Fearful Symmetry
by Starcrier
Summary: Madilyn Moone - thief among thieves, keeper of secrets, lover of poetry - has been dead for five years, and is quite content to remain that way. Unfortunately, John Wick and the Bowery King have other ideas. John Wick/OC.
1. Chapter I

_Fearful Symmetry_

Chapter I

John Wick is lost.

Well.

Not _lost_. Not exactly. Not physically, anyway - he knows where he _is_, but not why he's here, not what he's doing. A tiny desert town forty-five minutes from Vegas provides no more solutions to his predicament than the heart of New York City had, regardless of what the Bowery King had claimed.

It's been almost a month since they'd formed their shaky alliance. He would have expected the plan to have revealed itself, at least in part, by now.

He supposes the delay in tracking down his quarry is partially because he's distracted. Helen plagues him. Every new loss of her - the puppy, the house, the recordings on his phone, her pictures, his _ring _\- is still as fresh as the moment she'd flatlined in that hospital. She haunts him, dogs his steps, but she's not at all accusatory - no, she'd always been too gentle, too kind for that. She'd loved him too much, and perhaps that's the plague of it. She whispers in his ear, flickers just outside his field of vision, calls him in his dreams. He feels the ache of her in his chest and in his slowly-mending bones and in the stub of his missing ring finger.

It's… difficult. He puts one foot in front of the other, follows the Bowery King's increasingly-incomprehensible plans, loads and reloads his weapons, and every movement, every thought, word, and breath, he drowns in memories of her. Because what else is the point?

What else does he have_ left?_

The dog helps, somewhat. John has become adept at sneaking him into pet-free motel rooms - he seems to be enjoying the constant change of scenery, or at least adapting well to it.

He still doesn't have a name. Helen teases him about this too.

The past will come knocking, as John has discovered it always does and always will, and it will leave ruin in its wake, but for now he lingers, content to mill about in the backwater town of Indian Springs, Nevada. It's as good as anywhere else, even if he still has no idea what he's actually supposed to be doing here.

"I've got an ace in the hole there," the Bowery King had murmured two weeks ago, his voice uncharacteristically low as John recovered in what passed for the medical wing of his tunnels. "We're gonna need her for what comes next. All you have to do is find her."

"Who?" John had rasped on the bed, half out of his mind with pain and betrayal and the urge to _kill kill kill_ thrumming through his blood.

But the King had only smirked and leaned back in his seat, the gold-tipped cane in his left hand spinning endlessly, endlessly. "You'll know her when you see her."

The town is tiny and he's been here for almost two weeks, and so far he's come up empty. He has no idea what this is really supposed to be about, because the Bowery King never shows his full hand. John had only gone along with it despite the lack of details because he'd agreed he needed to get out of the city to recuperate, especially if they were going to launch a full-frontal assault on the High Table and the New York Continental. His body has been beaten to its limits in the weeks since Helen died, and as much as it galls him he _has _to take the time to regain his full strength if he wants to exact his revenge, and this time, make it permanent. He'd been lucky - if one could really call it that - when he'd fallen from the rooftop of the hotel; his ribs and extremities had taken the worst of the damage, leaving him with several bad fractures and a nasty concussion, but very few actual broken bones. He's still in almost constant pain, of course, but it's pain he can push through, ignore, cast aside while he hunts for the Bowery King's quarry.

There's a park here where he can walk - limp, really - with the dog, and the isolation gives him time to think, to plan his next move if he's unable to find who he's supposed to be looking for. He does not, at this juncture, actually have anything worked out, beyond _kill everyone involved_, but he'll get there eventually.

Or he won't. He's always had excellent improvisation skills, or so Winston always said.

Not that Winston's opinion on anything matters much, anymore.

The sun is setting. He doesn't really have anywhere he needs to be, or to do, but he could probably use a shower and in any case he's out of food for the dog, so he decides to stop by the store on his way back to the motel.

A whistle brings the animal back to his side - he probably _should _have a name, although where a person like him is even supposed to start with a normal thing like that is beyond him - and they begin to walk in the direction of main street, where the city's single grocery store is located.

There's no way to sneak a dog inside, and in the interest of keeping his head down he doesn't try - he simply gives a command and his companion sits obediently in the shade of the building. The dog pants a little, even as cooler temperatures set in with the evening. It really is unpleasantly hot here compared to New York, even though it's already mid-October.

It would bother him, if anything did.

The grocery, however, is aggressively air-conditioned, which is a relief - even if it is slightly more crowded than usual given the time of day. He resolves to hurry, making a limping beeline for the dog food. Any brand and size will do, so long as he can carry it without impediment, and he selects a bag at random, grateful the dog isn't the picky type.

He's on his way back towards the registers when… _something_ catches his attention. He'll never be sure, later, what makes him look - an instinct, maybe, or Helen's playful voice in his ear again: _look John, another ghost_.

Whatever the reason, his head sweeps to the left, and in the same instant, he falters, stumbles to cover the aborted movement and surreptitiously feigns interest in an arrangement of discounted oven cleaner on an endcap.

There's a dead woman in the cereal aisle.

She's oblivious to his scrutiny as she inspects a box of corn flakes, her mouth drawn in a contemplative frown. The tattooed wings that sweep up either side of her neck, black ink stark against pale skin, are what had caught his attention - a part of him is always at least partially focused on scanning his surroundings for distinctive symbols like this one whenever he's in public. The last time he'd seen that particular mark had been in New York, about a year before he'd gotten out the first time.

They'd called her the Blackbird, he recalls after a moment, but her real name is... Moone, maybe? Her first name had been an M too, he's pretty sure. The last he'd heard, she'd run her car into the Hudson, whether by accident or on purpose, and they'd fished her body out two days later - or something resembling her body, apparently, given that she's currently comparing cereal brands fewer than ten feet away from him.

He knows immediately, with the same instincts that have kept him alive all these years, that _this _is who the Bowery King had sent him to find.

But why?

He hadn't known her well - or at all, really; the extent of his professional association with her can be narrowed down to a ninety-second interaction in the hallway of the Continental six years ago - because Moone wasn't - _isn't _\- an assassin. She's a thief-for-hire, and there had been very little overlap in their work. Viggo had used her only once, if he recalls correctly; most of her contracts had been international, high-profile.

She'd been one of the best, once upon a time - but even that doesn't explain what use the Bowery King would have for a _thief _in this war he was preparing to wage.

John scowls down at the oven cleaner, wracking his brain for what he could remember about her supposed death. He'd already been out when it happened - the news had come about four months into his retirement, from Aurelio of all people, and mostly in passing. What had he said?

She'd gotten in over her head, that much he can recall - she'd stolen the wrong thing from the wrong person and a car chase gone south had, supposedly, ended her life. What had she taken, and from whom? He's missing something important, and he knows that because he remembers the news surprising him, remembers feeling a flicker of… not quite _disgust_, exactly, but something close.

If there had been any lingering doubts as to her identity, they disappear the moment she seems to decide on a brand of cereal she likes and makes her way back down the aisle towards him - the long, deep scars stamped in the shape of a perfect X across her mouth are unmistakable. The violent edges are softened with makeup as much as they can be, but short of a mask there's no outright hiding them. He remembers deliberately not looking at them, all those years ago in the hotel, remembers the way she'd curved a sardonic eyebrow like she'd known what he was doing.

Now, she breezes past him like he's not even there, and without so much as glancing in his direction; there's a measured urgency in her steps for someone who'd deliberated so long over whether or not to buy Raisin Bran.

He's careful to keep her in his sightline as he makes his way to a register at her back and pays for the kibble, lingering by the newspaper stand until she finishes her own transaction and passes through the front doors.

He keeps pace several steps behind her for as long as he can - at the very least he can see what kind of car she gets into, whether she's alone.

To his surprise, she'd apparently walked, and moves on foot through the parking lot and across the street to the row of houses on the other side, grocery bags in each hand. He follows her path with his eyes until she disappears down a sidewalk and around a corner, at which point he whistles for the dog and moves to pursue her.

He stays well back, never needing to pretend to turn or be occupied because she never once looks behind her, never once pauses. If she's really still in hiding, she apparently has a reason to believe she's safe - this isn't the paranoid behavior of a fugitive, and no one would know that better than him.

She continues walking for about ten minutes until she comes up on a salmon-colored house at the end of a cul-de-sac, at which point she turns up the driveway. John lingers at the other end of the street, casually kneeling down to pet his dog while still keeping an eye on Moone.

The house is tiny, but quaint, with bird-feeders and windchimes and gnome figurines in the front lawn. It's sickeningly cliche, right down to the white picket fence that rings the property.

There's a pang, somewhere, ringing hollowly in his chest - he resolutely does not think of New York or Helen or the ruin of his home or what he'd tried to build, once upon a time.

Moone disappears through the front door, causing the wreath of fake flowers hanging from the front to sway lazily. Several moments later a teenage girl walks out, her jaw working idly around a stick of bubblegum. She shoves a wad of money in the purse slung across her arm, and when she turns to wave back at the house, a tiny red-headed girl of around five pokes her head out the door, yelling something he can't make out from this distance.

The memory returns like a cartoon light bulb switching on.

That's what Moone had been "killed" for stealing - not money or artwork or information. A _child_. And not just any child, he recalls, but _Henry Kincaid's_ child, who had supposedly drowned when she did. The Bloody Banker's trademark red hair, now framing the pale, freckled face of the girl at the door, is unmistakable.

"The whole thing's messed up, man," he recalls Aurelio saying when he'd relayed the story over beer one night, shaking his head. "Kincaid's a bastard, don't get me wrong, but to lose a kid like that… it's just messed up."

According to Aurelio, no one knew who'd contracted Moone to take the kid, or if they did, no one ever said anything. Kincaid himself had been remarkably tight-lipped about the whole affair, and hadn't gone on a warpath to find answers, which meant he'd likely already had them and whoever _had_ hired Moone had probably been dealt with swiftly and mercilessly.

But Moone herself had, apparently, escaped unscathed. Her reasoning behind keeping the baby even after the job went south is a mystery, certainly, but not one that concerns him.

There's that not-quite-disgust he'd all but forgotten, rising in his throat and curling his lip. He doesn't need to see anything else. The kid appears happy and healthy and whole, at least, and Moone is alone and apparently quite content in her own version of retirement. She'd succeeded where he had failed.

Whether she'd deserved to or not apparently doesn't factor in to the equation.

Again, the question of what the Bowery King could possibly want with her rises slowly in his mind. The Marker in his pocket takes on a new weight, laden with possibilities, each of them darker and more bewildering than the last.

John has never been the schemer or the strategist, at least not outside the bounds of a contract. He's not designed for the long game, only for action and reaction, taking a hit and swinging back. It's why he's formed this hesitant alliance with the Bowery King in the first place even though he doesn't trust him as far as he can throw him - the King is the person best suited to cut him a clear path to where he needs to be to get his vengeance, and he's always been in favor of the direct approach.

He doesn't know how Moone fits into this plan of theirs, and he's not entirely sure he cares. Ultimately, there is nothing she can do to truly get in the way of his revenge, short of outright killing him, and she's not capable of that.

No one is.

"Come on, boy," he rasps down to his companion, who wags his tail up at him cheerfully, oblivious to his master's sudden dour mood.

Together, the pair of them walk back down the street and towards the motel. Now that he knows where she is, he can work out how best to approach her without being spotted. He can tail her to a neutral location tomorrow, sometime when she's not with the kid - there's no sense in involving her if it can be avoided.

Sofia's snarling, seething hatred in the firelight of her hotel springs to mind, the way she'd practically spat at him for cashing in on his Marker at the risk of her daughter. He'd remembered Santino, then, and hated himself for handling her with the same indifferent desperation.

At least he hadn't firebombed her hotel. _But then,_ he concedes, _she didn't refuse._

He shakes his head to clear it. He'll keep clear of the kid, or try, anyway, when he recruits Moone for whatever scheme the Bowery King has up his sleeve.

Hopefully _she_ won't shoot him on sight - this suit isn't bulletproof.

In his distraction, John doesn't notice the car idling at the end of the road, or catch the way the three men inside of it are watching his every move - or that they're covered head to toe in tattoos branding them for the Russian Mafia.

Not until it's too late, anyway.

* * *

Madilyn has a bad feeling. She gets them sometimes and they're usually false alarms, especially now that she's well and truly retired, but that knowledge doesn't make it any easier for her to settle down.

The whisper in the back of her brain repeatedly telling her _you missed something_ isn't helping matters.

Across the table from her, Winifred babbles about her day and the craft projects the babysitter had brought over; pink glitter still sparkles between her freckles whenever she tilts her head a certain way. It's too endearing for her to be annoyed about the mess, and Natalie _had _put wax paper down in a - perhaps futile, considering - attempt to catch the stray bits before they hit the carpet.

Oh well. The living room can do with some livening up, and anyway it's not as though they ever have guests over.

"Did you like my drawing, Mommy?" Winnie asks for what is approximately the eighth time in the hour since she's been home, and for the eighth time Madilyn nods solemnly.

"It's beautiful. Mr. Carroll would like the way your Jabberwock twinkles."

Delighted, Winnie grins widely enough to nearly split her face and goes back to her mac-and-cheese. "I'm gonna do a Jub-Jub Bird next," she says.

"Not a Bandersnatch?" Madilyn asks with some amusement, getting to her feet to clear her own plate. Her daughter has… not quite a _fear _of the Bandersnatch exactly, but perhaps a healthy wariness of it, which is probably her own fault since she always deepens her voice and makes her fingers into claws whenever she recites that part of the poem.

"_No_," Winnie says with no small amount of insistence, huffing like her own mother has betrayed her by asking.

Madilyn grins and turns back to the sink to finish washing up. _The Jabberwock_ isn't her daughter's favorite poem, but it's close - the made-up creatures and nonsense words delight her.

The sun has set fully now, and she idly lets her gaze settle on the window over the sink, giving her a view into the darkened backyard. The size of this backwater town is, frankly, abhorrent to her, but she can appreciate the quiet, and there are so many more stars to see all the way out here in the desert than there had been in New York. It has other benefits too, she knows, thinking of the little girl at her back - there's no reason for her past to come calling so far out in the middle of nowhere, no reason that it would try.

Indian Springs may be tiny and dusty and hot, constantly, but it's also safe and charming and idyllic and everything Madilyn never had - or wanted, really - but wants _Winnie _to have.

Madilyn, for her part, spends her free time sketching and working out and keeping the house and… not quite _spoiling _Winnie, perhaps, but doting on her, certainly. She doesn't work, and she doesn't need to - the nest egg from her former occupation is enough to have set them both up for life, so long as they live quietly and within their means, which suits Madilyn fine.

Now if only she could get that creeping sense of foreboding to go away.

As though she can sense her mother's anxiety, Winifred has a difficult time settling down for bed that evening. This isn't wholly unusual; she's a bright, exuberant child by nature who tends to try to delay her bedtime as much as possible on a nightly basis - by whatever means necessary. Impromptu games of hide-and-seek, pillow fights, dance parties, monster searches that span the whole house, and even the occasional temper tantrum are all in her arsenal. This is normally fine by Madilyn, whose childhood can be described in many different ways but never with words like _gentle_ or_ patient_ or _loved_, but the day's thrumming unease makes her eager to see her daughter safely to sleep so she can spend the next several hours patrolling her house with a knife clenched in her fist, hunting the ghosts that dance in the corners of her vision.

This is probably not a healthy mentality - she'd acknowledged that sometime around adding the sixth deadbolt to the front door - but she doesn't know how to change it, doesn't know that she wants to.

Once Winnie is completely ready for bed, bathed and brushed and tucked snug beneath layers of sugar-pink blankets and various stuffed animals, and her constellation nightlight throws dancing images of Orion and Scorpius and the Pleiades and a dozen others on the ceiling, Madilyn opens the worn collection of poetry she keeps in a place of reverence on the nightstand in her own bedroom. The tattered, yellowed book is over six-hundred pages long and filled with the greats, Dickinson and Poe and Shakespeare and Wordsworth. She has memorized every line on every page - the presence of the book is, by now, largely ritualistic.

They're working their way through Byron at the moment, and even though Winnie can't understand all the words yet, she listens with rapt attention, entranced by the rhythm of her voice.

They end with Winnie's favorite poem, as always - William Blake's _The Lamb_. Madilyn kneels down beside the bed for this part, running her fingers through her daughter's red curls and whispering the words into her hairline like a prayer. _Little lamb, God bless thee._

When she finally withdraws to leave, the jumpy, anxious feeling that had been plaguing her ever since she'd left the grocery store earlier is gone, leaving only a sensation of something like contentment in its place.

She grabs the knife anyway, just to be safe.

* * *

Madilyn is deeply engrossed in a nature documentary about Bengal tigers when _something _makes her head snap towards the back door. She can't say what it is, because she's sure there hadn't been a noise, but all of her instincts suddenly come alive at once, a prickle up her spine screaming _danger-danger-danger_.

Her eyes flick back to the screen in front of her. A tiger has just caught a gazelle in its jaws, and is tearing into its flesh - her hand flies to the pendant on her neck without her permission. She looks back to the door again, feeling goosebumps erupt on her arms.

Hardly daring to breathe, she feels for the Bowie knife she'd wedged between the couch cushions. Her fingers close around the hilt, but she does not otherwise move. _There's nothing there_, she thinks, then quirks her mouth in a sardonic smile, _'tis the wind and nothing more. _

The wind doesn't rattle door knobs, though, and hers is now _definitely _rattling. She moves before she even consciously decides to, leaping over the end of the couch and snapping the TV off with the remote in the same movement.

Instinct takes over - there's a bookcase just beside the entrance to the darkened hallway that leads to the bedrooms and she lunges for it, scaling the shelves in a half-instant. She wedges herself between the top of it and the ceiling, disregarding the dust that tickles her nose. It's solid oak, a worn but sturdy thing she'd bought secondhand when she was trying to figure out how to furnish a house of her own, and it doesn't so much as wobble under her weight.

The room is once again still and dark and silent save for the continued rattling at the door. She waits.

She can't say how long she remains there, perched in the blackness. A shroud has fallen over her awareness, a peculiar thrumming through her blood. All of her senses are alive, her breath steady, her mind clear. An awakening, like a beast lifting its head, scenting the air.

She hasn't felt this way since she crashed her car into the river, since she dragged her half-drowned baby out of the backseat, since she pricked her thumb on a Marker and said _please, please help us._

She'd have done anything, then, to save her daughter - and that resolve has not faded or diminished with time. It has solidified, water into ice, magma into rock, coal into diamond.

_By the pricking of my thumbs,_ she thinks as the glass shatters, inevitably, in the doorframe, _something wicked this way comes._

It sounds, to her ears, like a bomb going off. She doesn't jump, doesn't so much as bat an eyelash. Predictably, the locks click open, one after the other as the intruder reaches in to undo them - she curses herself for only putting three on the back door, for not getting a security system, a guard dog, reinforced glass. From this angle, she can't see the entryway, only the shadows cast by the security lights on the back porch, spilling on the floor through the windows like blood from an artery.

The door creaks open and the silhouette of a man slouches in. He's a mouth-breather, she notices immediately - she's never heard such panting from anyone who wasn't in death throes. Not a very good home invader then, whoever he is. The idea makes her nervous. Professionals are one thing; jumpy, desperate amateurs are quite another.

Her entire body tenses, coiled to spring.

_Will you walk into my parlor?_ she, or something inside her, the Thing she thought she left at the bottom of the Hudson, sneers, baring its teeth.

The figure almost seems to sway a moment, or at least the shadow does, then it grows, warps as it moves closer, passing into the living room. There's an odd gait to his steps - he almost looks like he's limping.

Whoever it is comes to an unsteady stop directly before her, and in the poor light leaking in from the covered windows and the open door behind him, he looks like a wraith. There's something familiar about him, about what little she can see of his profile when he turns to survey the room, but she can't quite put her finger on what it is.

That doesn't make it less unnerving; she adjusts her grip on the knife in response. He doesn't spot her and she knows he won't - men who break into women's houses for nefarious purposes never think to look _up_.

He might be an amateur. She is not.

He takes another step forward then, towards the hallway at her side that leads directly to her sleeping daughter. She waits until he's crossed the threshold of the hallway, and pounces.

Swinging down from the top of the bookcase, she uses the momentum to twist around and plant her feet in the small of his back, sending him sprawling. She gives him no time to recover, landing like a cat over his prone form and snarling, her knife flashing in the dark.

She's not a killer by trade, but that doesn't mean she's incapable of taking life - or even particularly unskilled at it.

He's already rolled to his back by the time she lands, and knocks the weapon away with the flat of his forearm just as she brings it down - there's a slippery _snik_ as the blade slices through skin, a _thunk_ as it buries itself in the floor by his head. Blood sprays in an arc on the tattered white carpet, splashes on the wall. His other fist flashes up in the same movement, connecting with her face - the blow jerks her head to the side but doesn't dislodge her. She recovers, drives her knee into his torso once, twice, driving his breath from him, bringing her free hand down at the same time on his nose to make sure he can't regain it. He turns again, rolling her beneath him, but the corridor isn't designed for grappling and the back of her head cracks against a baseboard.

She sees stars and her ears ring. The knife comes up again, trying to sink into his chest - he catches her wrist just in time and slams it down so hard it jars her arm to the shoulder.

"Stop," her assailant growls, and there it is again, that twinge of familiarity. She ignores it and claws at his eyes instead with the hand that isn't caught, lifting her hips once, twice to get the leverage to buck him off. It's like trying to flip an anvil. Or a bus.

"Moone, _stop_." He grabs her other arm, pins them both together with one hand and braces the other against her throat - she goes still, but not because of the hold he's got her in.

She goes still at the sound of her name, and at the way he'd said it.

_I know that voice,_ she thinks. The way he's holding her puts his face inches from hers, and when he tilts his head a certain way, the little light that's able to filter into the corridor glints off a pair of eyes so dark she feels they might consume her. She's had that feeling exactly one other time in her life, in the presence of exactly one person. There's a second of horror so profound she actually feels her limbs seize up.

_Holy hell, it's John Wick._ The sudden inevitability of her own death hits her like a sledgehammer to the face. Then, hysterically: _He's supposed to be retired!_

She realizes in that instant who, exactly, could make a man like Wick come out of retirement, and for what.

_Winnie,_ she realizes, and a beat later she's thrashing like a madwoman, snapping her teeth, spitting in his face, jerking her body in a desperate attempt to just _get him off, get him away, all I need is a moment, I just need a second to get to Winnie, you can't take her you can't have her no no _no_ \- _

"Moone!" He rears back and slams her against the baseboard again, jarring her back to temporary stillness. "I'm not here to kill you."

"What," she rasps, sneering, once she recovers, curling her hands into fists despite the way his hold on her is making them go numb, "are you here to sell girl scout cookies?"

Now that she's actually looking at him, she can see he doesn't look well - he's bleeding from injuries she knows she didn't cause and gasping for breath like he's just run a marathon. He's pale and, if she's not mistaken, actually trembling. _And still beating me to a pulp_, she thinks with no small amount of annoyance, glowering.

There's a flash of something in his expression, something she can't read in the dark but might have named uncertainty.

"Do you have a first aid kit?" he says finally, and she's so surprised she actually laughs at him.

"Not for you, jackass."

He presses on her windpipe harder in response. She spits again, bracing for another blow. It doesn't come, but what _does_ hits her just as hard.

"Mommy?"

Madilyn jerks her head back so quickly she knows she pulls something, taking in the upside-down sight of her daughter standing in her bedroom doorway. Her thumb is in her mouth, free fingers curled around a ratty stuffed lamb, and her Rapunzel nightgown is twisted around her body. Her brow is furrowed in the gentle, innocent confusion of a child who doesn't quite understand what violence is and so is unable to be properly frightened by it.

She's standing, completely defenseless, directly in the crosshairs of the assassin professionally known as the Boogeyman. The irony would be almost comical if it wasn't so horrific. Madilyn feels something in her unfurl, spring free of a cage she'd kept locked for five years.

_Mine! _

At the sight of her daughter, Wick's grip slackens just slightly, possibly in surprise. It's all she needs - Madilyn rears up with everything she has, straining every muscle in her torso and arms, and slams her head into his. This is not an ideal move, for obvious reasons, but it's all she's got, and it works despite the way her vision temporarily whites out from pain. He recoils from her with a grunt, dazed - she snatches the knife in her newly-freed grip and drives the handle with all her might directly into his temple.

He collapses, senseless, to the floor beside her, and does not move again.

Madilyn doesn't hesitate - she wriggles out from under him and all but claws her way down the hall, every muscle in her body screaming even as a singular thought drives all notice of it from her mind: _get to Winnie, get to Winnie, get to Winnie. _

Her arms fold around her baby, holding her close, rocking her gently in the dark of the hallway. _Mine,_ repeats the monster under her skin, temporarily appeased. Winnie is plainly confused, but doesn't say anything, doesn't squirm, simply lets herself be held.

Madilyn had been wrong, _so _wrong, to think her past wouldn't catch up to her here - Wick had been an unknown quantity, one she never would have foreseen in a hundred years, but that's no excuse. She'd grown complacent, comfortable with the security she'd forged around herself and her daughter, and Winnie had almost paid the price for it.

A wave of nausea nearly bowls her over - it's only several deep breaths that keep her from being sick all over the hallway floor. She needs her head clear, needs to think.

"Who is that?" Winnie asks after a long time, and possibly more than once - it's hard to hear anything through the ringing in her ears.

After a moment, Madilyn finds her voice again. She pulls back to look her daughter in the face, to smooth stray pieces of rose-red hair away from her eyes. It's curious to her how much she loves this little girl when _love _had always been a foreign, abstract concept before, but she can't, in this moment, think of anything she wouldn't do to keep her safe, no level she wouldn't sink to, no crime she wouldn't commit.

"He's nobody, baby," she lies, smiling gently as she can. The blood is still buzzing under her skin. She turns to look at Wick's prone form over her shoulder. Wrath stirs within her again, whirling like dust kicked up in a windstorm, tinting the edges of her vision red. "Mommy's gonna take care of him, don't worry."

Her daughter nods, trusting her completely. She blinks once, twice, slowly, clearly in need of several more hours of sleep. Madilyn picks her up, tucks her close, carries her back into her bedroom. A steady resolve is building in her blood, plans spinning through her brain.

She's going to do whatever is necessary to protect Winnie, the same way she had five years ago.

Which means John Wick is going to have to die.

**A/N: John Wick: Parabellum killed me. I'm deceased.  
Also it's worth mentioning that the absolute last thing I want IN CANON is for John to have a love interest other than Helen because they definitely will screw it up. But I'm gonna make it an angst-filled realistic slooooooooow burn, ya'll. Also, Helen straight up TOLD him to find something to love. So I'm technically only following her orders.**

**I don't own anything but Madilyn Moone and Winnie. Indian Springs is a real place in Nevada, but I've never been there so if I got something right it's by accident. **

**Reviews are love! **

**Sincerely,**

**Starcrier.**


	2. Chapter II

_fearful symmetry_

Chapter II

The car is packed, and the go-bags she'd prepared years in advance for a moment just like this one are already waiting in the trunk. Winnie is dressed and waiting in her bedroom for them to leave, and probably also dozing, given the hour and her own lack of understanding about the urgency of the situation.

But Madilyn can only stand, unmoving, in the hallway over John Wick's body, ears ringing, hands trembling, fury and fear freezing her blood.

Here's the thing: Madilyn knows Wick, knows his reputation, and knows if she leaves him alive he won't stop until she's dead and Winnie is in his grasp. That _can't _be allowed to happen. The flip of the knife at the last second, striking him in the head with the handle rather than the blade, had been purely instinctive, because she'd hadn't been about to murder a man in the direct sightline of her five-year-old daughter.

But Winnie isn't watching now.

The thought jolts her into action. She grabs the shower curtain from the bathroom and rolls Wick onto it with a great deal of effort, knife between her teeth in case her movements should wake him up. The curtain makes it easier for her to drag him out of the hall and back into the living area, which, while not exactly spacey, leaves her with at least marginally more room to do what she has to.

But first, precautions.

There are a few pairs of emergency handcuffs in the back of her closet - she unearths two and closes an end of each one around both of his wrists, before looping the other ends around the legs of the wrought-iron coffee table. As far as restraints go, it certainly _looks_ odd, but she knows from personal experience how heavy that table is, and while nothing will stop him if he wakes up and tries to kill her again, it will at least slow him down enough for her to grab Winnie and get away.

Not that she's planning on letting him live that long.

She removes the knife from her mouth, spinning it once, twice, three times in her grip. _Right then._ She kneels down and holds it over his chest, taking in the rough, dark stubble that decorates his face, the way the shadows play on the hollows under his cheekbones, the circles under his eyes.

She realizes, quite suddenly, that she's never killed a man in cold blood before, and certainly not an unconscious one. It shouldn't bother her. She's done worse things, probably, and anyway _he_ wouldn't hesitate if their positions were reversed.

An inhale. _It's for Winnie._ Madilyn raises the knife more levelly, aims the point directly over his heart. Quick, clean, efficient. _Nothing personal, Wick._

She watches the weak rise and fall of his chest, watches the way his blood slicks the shower curtain. It occurs to her that she might not actually have to _do_ anything - if she leaves him like this he'll likely die on his own.

_Do you have a first aid kit_, he'd asked. So he'd definitely been in a fight before he'd come here, but with who? Over what? Why waste the time _asking_ her for it when he could have just killed her and taken it himself, along with Winnie?

_I'm not here to kill you,_ he'd also said. She can't think of a reason why he would lie about that.

_You missed something_, comes the thought again. She scowls in response.

John Wick works alone, he always has, but that doesn't mean he hadn't at least reported his whereabouts to his client - and if _that's_ who she suspects it is, then he would have been contractually obligated to do so. She's not going to be able to kill him until she knows for certain what he's doing here, how he'd found her, why he was even looking. _Damn_.

Scowling again, she sits back and runs a free hand through her hair, considering. She takes in the back door, closed now from Wick's unconventional entrance but missing glass in the pane, and turns her attention back to the unconscious man before her.

_Just kill him_, she thinks, _just kill him and run, let the chips fall where they may. There can't be any worse threat than a live John Wick on your tail._

A memory comes to her then, unbidden and unwelcome, as many of her memories tend to be: six years ago, on a sunny afternoon in the New York City Continental. She'd just returned from a grueling month-long job in Madrid, and her immediate plans had consisted of a hot bath and turning in early before she made her way to her bolthole in DC the next morning.

She'd almost made it, too - but then, of course, that rat bastard Elston had caught up to her in the hallway, and all her carefully-laid plans vanished before her eyes.

Jack Elston was two things: a proficient killer and an _incredible _sleaze, and he'd earned both those titles twice over. He was exactly the kind of person you didn't want to get caught in an empty corridor with, but then her luck _had _always been dismal.

She should have seen it coming, in retrospect - she had never been oblivious to the appraising looks he'd give her when they crossed paths, or the predatory curl of his lip when he stared her down across the bar or the lobby or wherever else she'd been unfortunate enough to share the same space with him, however briefly. Madilyn had known those signs, read them for the warnings they were, and had kept a wary distance. Stupid, _stupid _of her to let her guard down, to forget the threats that lurked in every corner of the hotel, no matter the safeguards that Management tried to set in place.

She hadn't been afraid, exactly, because it would take more than a man like Elston to bring _that_ emotion out in her, but she'd been immediately, viscerally aware of the danger of her situation. She hadn't dared try to make it to her room, not wanting to risk revealing it to him if he didn't already know which one it was, and there was no one she could call out for, no one who would come to her aid if she did. And she definitely wasn't going to _run_.

As always, if she wanted safety, her only option was to fight for it, and to do so alone.

Blood couldn't be spilled on Continental grounds outside of immediate and unavoidable self-defense, but that rule wasn't always enough of a deterrent for some of the patrons, regardless of just how serious the threat of excommunication was. Elston was a trained killer, and she was only a thief - if she was forced to defend herself against his advances, he would dispose of her body like she was just another contract. Whether or not he'd get away with it in the long run was irrelevant, since she'd be dead in either case - but he likely would, since it wasn't as though anyone would notice her absence, or care overmuch if they did.

Still, she wasn't about to just stand back and let him assault her without repercussions - her days of doing _that _were long over - and so had withdrawn the razor-sharp hairpin, approximately the length of her forearm, she'd kept tucked in her braid for emergency situations just like that one.

Elston had only grinned, oil-slick, as he'd attempted to back her into a wall, but if he'd expected her to cower, he was disappointed. She gave no ground - merely steeled her spine and let him advance, raising the hairpin higher and higher with every step he took until it was perfectly positioned directly in front of his jugular.

Everything about him was just… _off_, ever so slightly, from the gleam of his too-white teeth to the pallor of his skin to the bottle-blonde in his hair. He'd always reminded her of a Ken doll left too long in the sun.

"You're too close, Elston," she'd warned, in case the blade in her hand didn't convey that message clearly enough.

"Lighten up, Moone," he'd replied, tilting his head at her. "You look like a gal who doesn't know how to have any fun. Let me show you a good time, huh?"

"Watching you bleed out on this carpet will be plenty fun."

If anything, her threat only seemed to amuse him. "Cute," said Elston. His hand flashed up to snatch her wrist, and in the same movement crowded her so abruptly she was knocked back into the wall before she knew what happened. "That tongue of yours is gonna get you into trouble one day, you know."

"That _does _tend to be a pattern." She'd been wrong, earlier; it would be immensely more satisfying - if arguably less lethal - to slam the blade through his eye socket rather than his jugular. She'd earned her right to be respected over and over and over again, and the fact that she was _still _having to prove herself, to claw and scrape for the right to just be left _alone_, made her want to scream.

She could see her next steps clearly - _knee to the groin, free fist to the face, hairpin to whatever she could reach once his grip on that arm loosened_ \- but was suddenly interrupted by the soft click of a door opening to her right. Both of them jerked to look - Elston in annoyance, Madilyn in something that she would never have called relief but might have been close. Until, of course, she saw who it was.

It took her a long second to recognize him - too long, probably, but then she'd never seen him in person before. John Wick, of all people, was staring at them from the entrance to what was apparently his own room, his head cocked, his expression impassive. He was taller than she'd expected, and he wore a dark, perfectly-tailored suit that gave him an ominous, inevitable appearance, like a gathering storm.

For whatever reason, she'd felt a chill slip down her spine. It was annoying.

"Elston," he'd greeted in a voice like gravel - she privately thought it suited him. He must have just returned from a job; there were tiny cuts and scattered bruises all over his face and his knuckles were swollen and purpling. Aside from that, he'd looked put-together, almost polished.

_A gentleman from sole to crown, clean favored, and imperially slim. _The thought had come without warning, and she'd scowled at it.

"Wick," Elston responded. He hadn't looked pleased to see the other man - she wasn't sure if this was due to his timely interruption or to the general fact that Wick was miles out of his league professionally. Elston, for all his bravado and general skill, was still mostly small potatoes, while Wick's rumored allies at the High Table_ alone_ made his peers wary of him, to say nothing of his kill count or the nature of the wetwork he did for Viggo Tarasov.

There was also the whole pencil thing, which Madilyn still wasn't totally sure she believed.

Wick had turned to look at her next, his cool, dark gaze flicking between her and Elston and coming to rest on the hairpin still clenched in her hand. If he'd had any opinions on what was going on, she couldn't have hoped to guess at them, though his eyes seemed to take on a peculiar glint. "Moone, right?"

"That's me."

"I've been looking for you." That surprised her, and clearly Elston too, if the way he'd seemed to withdraw from her - even if only slightly - was any indication.

"I've been out of the country," had been all she could think to say, because there was literally no reason she could think of as to _why _Wick would want to talk to her. The only time Tarasov had wanted her for a job, he'd had one of his grunts get into contact through Charon - he wouldn't use Wick for something so inane.

Wick had moved out of his doorway and took a casual step toward them. "Do you have a minute to talk?" He'd made a vague sort of gesture at his room, and she'd frowned in response.

_Out of the frying pan, into the fire_. There was little real conviction behind the thought, because whatever Wick was planning, it couldn't possibly be any worse than what Elston wanted - although, she reasoned, if his intentions _were _similar, she'd have a significantly harder time getting away.

Before she could make any kind of reply, however, the creep still half-pinning her to the wall screwed his face up into a snarl that somehow made him look twice as unattractive as before. "There's no shop-talk on Continental grounds, Wick, you know the rules. Besides, Moone's busy at the moment."

Rage - at Elston, at her own stupidity, at Wick - had flashed through her, narrowing her vision, pulling at her control. Her arm jerked in an aborted lunge for his neck, muscles trembling with restraint. She _definitely _shouldn't try to kill Elston with Wick watching, not if she wanted to avoid giving Elston a witness to help justify assaulting her - but she was _this close_ to doing it anyway.

Looking back, she couldn't quite remember _how_ Wick had reacted to Elston's words, exactly, or if he even had at all, but when he set his dark gaze on her assailant, Elston released her as quickly as though he'd been burned.

"You're welcome to bring a complaint to Management," Wick had replied. There was no particular tone in his voice, and no particular expression on his face - if it was a challenge, it wasn't a very good one. But when Elston made no reply other than to glower, Wick looked back at her, expectant.

Madilyn had always prided herself on being an excellent reader of people - it was how she'd survived to adulthood, actually - but she was getting _nothing_ from Wick. Reading him was like trying to read a brick wall, and the idea of going anywhere with him, anywhere _near_ him, was viscerally unnerving.

_More than Elston?_ came the thought, and another on its heels: _Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - _

She sighed.

"You're in luck, Wick," she'd finally said, forcing her voice to level. "My schedule just blew _wide_ open." She'd stepped away from the wall and moved to his side without so much as a passing glance back at Elston.

The man in question, however, wasn't about to let her off so easily. "Be seeing you, Moone," he sneered, casually tucking his hands into his pockets and watching her as she disappeared into Wick's room. She didn't even bother replying, merely flicked her middle finger up at him without looking back.

She'd kept her grip on her hairpin as Wick followed her inside, gently shutting the door behind him. Not that she thought it would be much help if he _did _decide to attack her, but it was always good to have options. _Do not go gentle_, and all that.

"What did you want to talk about, Wick?"

She saw no sense in beating around the bush since they weren't even acquaintances and so could have no small talk to make, and anyway the hot bath in her hotel room was looking more and more enticing by the minute - even if Elston did know what floor she was staying on, and would likely come sniffing around again.

Not a headache she was looking forward to dealing with.

When Wick hadn't immediately replied, she'd turned back to face him, brow raised. It was then that she'd been treated to what must have been a rare sight indeed - John Wick, the Baba Yaga, seemed almost... _uncomfortable_. She could think of only two reasons for this: it either meant he was about to proposition her himself - albeit much more politely than Elston had, apparently - or he hadn't actually wanted to talk to her at all, and his only motive in saying so had been to give her a way out from the slimy weasel's attentions.

She wasn't sure which scenario she found more horrifying.

"The job in Madrid," he said, "was that you?"

It was an inane question, one he likely already knew the answer to. "Yes," she'd replied anyway, wrongfooted and annoyed.

They'd stood in silence for a long, awkward second. His eyes tracked over her face, but never seemed to linger anywhere - they always jerked sharply away whenever they strayed towards her mouth. In any other situation, she would have taken that to mean he was fighting attraction to her, but she knew his avoidance had more to do with the deep, pin-straight scars crossed over her lips. It was a bizarre attempt at courtesy, or whatever passed for it in this hellhole. She'd cocked an eyebrow at him, daring him to comment on them.

"It was impressive," he'd eventually said, not rising to the bait. The whole situation was suddenly so ridiculous she would have laughed if she still knew how.

"It was easy," she'd replied instead. And it had been - stealing was the only thing she'd ever been good at. Some days, like when she woke gasping and sweat-drenched from dreams she never dared to dwell on for longer than the time it took to reorient herself, or when she was confronted with the gaps in her memory, or when she stared too long at her own reflection, she thought it might even be easier than breathing.

"You should let Management know about your rodent problem," Wick said, his dark eyes never leaving hers. The effect was deeply unsettling and she didn't appreciate it.

"Rodent problem?"

He'd made a sound vaguely like a grunt. "They let guests switch rooms free of charge in the event of an… infestation. Discreetly, of course. No one would ever know you'd changed floors."

It took entirely too long for what he was actually saying to register. Damn and double damn, but he _had _been helping her. She was abruptly seized with the urge to get out of the room and away from killers with agendas, hidden or otherwise.

"Is that all you wanted?" she'd demanded, fighting to keep her tone flat, even, disinterested.

He'd blinked at her, equally impassive. "Yeah."

"Okay then." She'd brushed past him and out the door without so much as a goodbye, irritated with the entire turn of events.

_I _hate _this hotel,_ she'd thought, and not for the first time. All the dealers, forgers, thieves and killers in one place, trading coins and generally pretending they wouldn't all murder one another given ten bucks and half a chance… it made her teeth itch.

Fortunately, Elston had long since vacated the corridor by the time she'd emerged, and she ruthlessly squashed the feeling of relief that rose up in her as she made her way down the hall to her own room. Wick might have done her a favor, but she'd eat glass before she'd let him know she was grateful for it - especially since she couldn't determine a motive.

She'd never spoken another word to Wick after that, but he'd been right about Management - a single comment to Charon about seeing a rat got her moved to a much nicer room on the top floor with no one else the wiser about the change. She'd never seen Elston in person again, despite his parting words.

A year later, Wick was retired and she was dead.

Five years after that, and here they are, and it's infuriating. She can't stop thinking about the look in his eyes when he'd seen Elston pinning her up against that wall, or the way Wick had said _I'm not here to kill you._

She doesn't owe him anything. She _doesn't_.

She's just going to extend him some professional courtesy, that's all.

Groaning with exasperation, she lowers the knife and tucks it into the waistband of her pants at her back, before running a hand through her hair. Every part of her body aches in a way it hasn't in years - she's kept up with her fitness regime, but fighting for one's life has a way of working muscles in a way that's hard to train for. And she has a _splitting _headache.

Sighing, she begins to pat him down. He'd had a gun and several ammo cartridges on his waist when he'd come in, but she's long since hidden those on top of the fridge. Her search turns up a knife at his ankle, and nothing in his pants pockets except a dead cell phone with a shattered screen and a few gold coins, glimmering in the dim light. She stares at them for a long moment, thinking of her own stash, long unused, concealed under the floorboards at the back of her closet with her gear and her knives and her past.

_All that is gold does not glitter_, she thinks sardonically, before pocketing the phone and the coins and moving on. She removes his tie and belt, because it's John Wick, and tosses them aside to deal with later.

He's not wearing body armor like a moron, which is why he's all cut up, blood seeping through his white dress shirt in several places. Her hands come away streaked with crimson when she rummages through his inner coat pockets. There's another cell phone here, a burner, with only one number plugged into the contacts.

A chill goes down her spine as she stares at the glowing screen until it's burned into her retinas. There's only one person the number can belong to, only one person who could have sent Wick here. _You can't have her, Kincaid,_ she thinks, willing him to hear her through the miles and years that separate them. _I'll never let you have her, you bastard._

She pockets that phone too, and is about to withdraw from Wick entirely before her fingertips brush against one last item, buried at the bottom of his right inner pocket. It's cool, engraved metal, circular but too big to be a coin, which means there's only one other thing it can be.

_A Marker_, Madilyn realizes as she withdraws it, clarity dawning, _so that's how Kincaid got him to come out of retirement._ Although why Wick would have been stupid enough to give Henry Kincaid, of _all _people, a Marker is completely beyond her.

But then the light catches it, and the breath rushes out of her lungs as sharply as though she'd been gut-punched.

_It can't be._

She stands almost mechanically, moves into the kitchen, flicks the light on to better study the object in her hands.

Every Marker is different. They're custom made-to-order, distinct as a fingerprint for each person in the Business who requests one - or several, for those more prone to taking drastic measures to achieve their goals. When Madilyn had first started out, she had ordered exactly two, no more, no less - both only for dire emergencies. One of them is buried, unused, with the coins in her closet.

She's currently holding the other.

There's no need to validate it - she _knows _the engraving of the seven sweeping ravens circling the edge, the glint of the four golden pomegranates between them, the distinctive curve of the spiked crozier in the center. She knows that if she opens this medallion she'll see her own bloody thumbprint staring back at her, the same as when she first left it there five years ago.

_You missed something,_ she thinks again.

She's back at Wick's side in three quick strides, blood buzzing with confusion and rage and _no, no, no._

The force of her slap jerks his head to the side, but doesn't awaken him. If she's being honest, she's amazed that not only had she been able to knock him out in the first place, but that he'd _stayed _knocked out - in fact he likely wouldn't have if he hadn't already been in such terrible shape. She knows with a horrible, ringing certainty that she will never get this lucky again.

Two more slaps get his eyelids fluttering. "Wick," she calls, growing more desperate by the minute. His entire body goes tense when he comes to at least partial wakefulness. "Wick, how did you get my Marker?"

He grunts something she can't make out. She slaps him once more, so hard her palm stings. "Wick, _how?_"

"The Bowery King," he coughs, and her heart stops in her chest. "He wants to… talk to you."

"_Why?_" she snarls.

Five years. She'd given him that Marker _five years ago_, and he's never used it. What could be so important that he'd call on her now?

Another cough, a groan. His eyelids flutter again, this time with the effort of staving off unconsciousness. Baring her teeth, she presses the heel of her hand into a gash in his side - regardless of how he'd gotten it, it had begun to clot, but at her touch it bursts open again, hot blood spilling onto the curtain, the carpet. He comes back with a grunt of pain, jerks like he wants to stop her, jerks more, almost growling, when he realizes he can't.

She doesn't flinch away despite her every instinct telling her to do so. "Wick. _Why?_"

"Because he needs your _help_," he grunts, snarls, practically writhing on the ground in an effort to dislodge her. The handcuffs rattle loudly against the legs of her coffee table, and blood runs down his arms as the metal bites into the skin of his wrists.

With one hand, she reaches back for the knife in her waistband. With the other, she presses even harder on his wound, half-hoping it kills him.

"With what?" she demands. He doesn't answer, only hisses through his teeth, body bucking with his instinctive need to fight but lacking the coherency to do it with his usual lethally effective results. She can see consciousness and clarity leaking out of him with every millisecond that passes. Cursing, she realizes he won't make it through an interrogation, despite how urgently she needs one - baring her teeth in desperation, she asks the most important question she has, the only one, when it comes right down to it, that actually matters.

"Does Henry Kincaid know where I am?" she hisses, leaning so close to him she can feel his ragged breaths against her face, stirring her hair. He smells like blood and sweat and gunpowder. She wants to kill him very badly.

"No," he rasps, eyes locking on hers with startling sharpness. There's something weighted there, almost accusing, but then it's gone, and his entire body goes limp as he loses the battle against unconsciousness once more.

Madilyn curses sulfurously, sitting back on her heels. She looks down at the Marker in her hands, blood boiling, rage spiking, heart pounding. She ought to be relieved - whatever this is, Kincaid doesn't appear to have anything to do with it.

She screams anyway, and pitches the Marker against the far wall so hard it chips the paint. She turns back to Wick, lying in a puddle of blood and Winnie's glitter, and tries to remember how to move, how to breathe, how to _think_.

Indecision courses through her. She knows, logically, what she ought to do. She also knows what she _wants _to do, and it's the far less merciful of the two options.

She considers the knife in her hand, the man on her floor, the hallway to the bedroom where her daughter sleeps.

_Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - _

**A/N: Things are ramping up a little! I hope you enjoyed - please let me know if you did!**

**Thanks to everyone who reviewed, fav'd, and followed last time! You guys rock my world. **

**Sincerely,**

**Starcrier. **


	3. Chapter III

_fearful symmetry _

Chapter III

Somewhere, breakfast is cooking. John can smell eggs, bacon grease, warm butter.

His first thought is: _Helen_. This is followed, as it always is, by a rush of grief so strong it nearly knocks the wind out of him. A jolt of remembrance, if not quite clarity, comes on its heels.

It seems to take Herculean effort to pry his eyes open, and more still to keep them that way. When he does, his gaze locks with a pair of baby-blues set in a freckled, cherubic face, peering down at him curiously. They belong to the redheaded child he'd seen before, at the front door and then in the hallway - Kincaid'schild. When their eyes meet, she shrieks and darts out of his line of sight. The sound sends a spike of pain lancing through his already-pounding skull.

"Winifred Eleanor, I _know_ you were not just in the living room after I told you to stay out of there."

_Moone_. He jerks to sit up only to realize that he can't - a tilt of his head reveals that he's trapped in what's possibly the most ridiculous position he's ever been restrained in, and _that's_ saying something. He's lying prone on his back on her living room floor, with both hands cuffed above his head to the legs of a low, solidly-built coffee table. Effective, possibly, but still ridiculous - and a little insulting.

He's also, upon further inspection, not wearing a shirt, and the right leg of his pants has been cut away at the thigh. He's momentarily confused until he sees the bandages, and when he does he's even more so - actually, the fact that he's alive at all is a little bewildering, even if he does have her Marker.

Her voice had come from somewhere to his left - when he finally musters the energy to turn his head to look, he catches the shadow of her movement as she maneuvers around the kitchen.

"I wasn't!" the child - apparently named Winifred - says from somewhere behind the couch that separates the living room from the dining area. She peeks her head around to look at him again, only to jerk back with comical speed once she realizes he's still staring her way.

"Right," says Moone skeptically, emerging fully into his sightline for the first time. She's barefoot, wearing a wifebeater and a pair of baggy grey sweatpants rolled several times at the waist, and her blonde hair has been thrown into a loose, functional bun at the nape of her neck. The wing tattoos on either side of her neck are on display, as is the calligraphy that spans the length of her collarbones, although he can't quite make out the words from this distance.

Despite her clear annoyance, she bends down to pick up the child and deposit her at the kitchen table with incredible gentleness - he's seen people handle priceless works of art with less care.

She casts an almost casual glance over her shoulder at him, instinctive rather than deliberate - only to freeze like a deer in headlights once she realizes he's awake. For a moment they just… stay like that, watching each other.

It only lasts an instant before her face suddenly contorts in a fierce scowl and she turns her back on him, moving back into the kitchen and reemerging with two plates of food.

She places one in front of the girl and then seats herself at the head of the table, facing him but deliberately not looking his way again as she eats.

"Why isn't the man eating breakfast?" Winifred asks.

"He's not hungry," Moone replies without missing a beat.

There's a squeaking noise as the girl shifts in her chair - she's too small to see him from where she's sitting and apparently that bothers her. "How do you know?"

"Because Mommy knows everything. Sit down on your bottom, Winifred."

There is more squeaking as she complies. "Who is he?"

"We've been over this. He's our guest."

"What's his name?"

"... Mr. John."

"Why is he laying like that?"

"He's in time-out."

"'Cause he broke the window?"

"Yes, he broke the window, and he was also _very _rude to Mommy."

"How come he isn't in the time-out _chair?_" Judging by her tone of voice, this is, apparently, a serious breach in protocol.

"He's in the time-out for grown-ups," replies Moone, never losing her gentle, patient tone. "Eat your breakfast, Winifred."

They're quiet for a while, and he uses the lull to study the room. Like everything else about the house, it's charming and functional. Every lemon-yellow wall he can see is lined with bookshelves that nearly reach the ceiling - the one directly in front of him had been where Moone had lain in wait to attack him when he'd first entered. Upon closer inspection, he can see that it's stuffed to capacity with parenting books, as are the two bookshelves at his right, with authors ranging from famous to obscure, and topics covering every child-rearing subject imaginable. There are dozens more stacked on the floor against the wall and on the end table, and they appear to cover subjects all the way to the preteen years.

An analog clock on the wall reads ten after eight. There's a TV somewhere behind him, he remembers, and a pair of worn, dark green couches that face each other on opposite sides of the coffee table he's cuffed to. Pictures of the girl are interspersed throughout the room, hanging on walls and framed on shelves.

Moone has created an isolated little paradise for herself and Kincaid's child here, and has apparently taken the job of raising her very seriously - in fact, she seems to be _good _at it.

"How did he get those boo-boos?" the child asks, apparently still fixated.

Moone's reply carries hints of both exasperation and amusement. "He ran with scissors."

The child gives a soft, shocked gasp. He wonders, almost absently, if _he _was ever innocent enough to think running with scissors was the most dangerous thing a person could get up to. He doesn't think so.

"Did you kiss them better?"

There's an odd choking sound in response. "Did it go down the wrong hole, Mommy?" Winnie asks.

"Finish your breakfast, Winnie," Moone finally says once her throat is clear. Her eyes find his over the couch, and there's something of a warning in them, as though she's daring him to react. He doesn't.

"I'm done," says the girl, former topic forgotten. "Can I watch TV?"

"Not right now. Mommy needs to talk to her… er, friend."

"But I want - "

"Winifred," Moone says, and nothing else, but the little girl must hear the warning because the following silence carries the distinctive ring of a pout. "Take your plate to the sink and wash your hands," Moone continues gently, though her tone had never been harsh, "and then you can go color in your room for a while. If you're very quiet, you can watch TV later, okay?"

The little girl huffs but moves to obey, stomping deliberately to convey her displeasure with the situation as she does so. When she's finished at the sink, Moone carries her past him and down the hall without so much as a glance his way, and deposits the girl in the room he'd seen her emerge from last night.

She doesn't acknowledge him when she returns, instead moves back into the kitchen where the sounds of her cleaning up can be heard. John studies the coffee table and waits - it's close to half an hour before she enters the living room again and by that time he's long since worked out how to free himself. That will have to be done delicately, though; if he makes one wrong move here, he knows she'll attack him again and he'd rather avoid another fight with her, if at all possible. The Bowery King probably needs her intact, after all.

Calmly, she drags one of the kitchen chairs to his side and sits down, leaning forward and resting her forearms on her knees. The position and proximity puts her face right over his, blocking out the light from the kitchen. The scars crossed over her mouth are pronounced today, likely due to the lack of makeup, and stretched taut, her lips set in a thin, tense line. Her long, delicate fingers, crooked in odd places and punctuated with blunt, chipped nails, are closed around the handle of the same Bowie knife she'd tried to bury in his chest last night.

The calligraphy on her chest he couldn't make out earlier says _hope is the thing with feathers_ in a looping, spidery scrawl, just beneath the wings on her neck. This close, he can make out bruises, too, from their grappling - her lower jaw is swollen and discolored, her lip is split at the corner. There are dark marks on her throat and wrists from where he'd held her down, and all of it gives her a fierce, nearly feral appearance.

Her sudden smile is a thing entirely devoid of humor - she gives an odd flick of her hand and the Marker the Bowery King had given him appears between her fingers, as though she'd pulled it from thin air. She waves it at him jauntily before flipping it easily across her knuckles, over and back, over and back.

"So," she says, eyes never leaving his, "I think it's about time you and I had a chat, Mr. Wick."

* * *

Madilyn can't, at this moment, recall a time when she has ever been more out of her element. She's not an interrogator, not by a long shot, and she knows with complete certainty that there is no amount of pain she's capable of inflicting that John Wick couldn't endure.

And anyway, she doesn't particularly _want _to.

But she still needs answers - chief among them being _what the hell is going on_ \- and because beating it out of him isn't an option she's just going to have to hope he continues to tell the truth.

_Ugh._ She really should just kill him and run.

But this place… it's the only home Winnie has ever known. Before she uproots her daughter into the life of a fugitive, ripping her away from the safety and stability Madilyn literally died to give her, she's going to make absolutely certain it's necessary first.

Also, there's the issue of that damn Marker, and what the Bowery King would do to her - and Winnie - if she ran instead of honoring it.

She studies Wick from her bent position in the chair, her eyes trailing over his figure. He really doesn't look well. His clothes had come away dripping with blood when she'd removed them to bandage him last night - she'd been forced to cut them off him and had been privately grateful he hadn't been wearing one of those bulletproof suits the Continental had been so fond of providing. What she'd found had been swathes of black and purple bruises spanning the entire length of his torso and likely his back, four dangerously deep stab wounds and what had appeared to be a graze from a narrowly-dodged bullet. The worst of it is probably the jagged, five-inch-long knife wound in his upper right thigh - she's no doctor but she's pretty sure it's uncomfortably close to a major artery. It's the only injury of his that hasn't fully clotted, which she knows isn't a good sign.

But there are older wounds, too, ugly ones, on his shoulder and to the lower right of his abdomen, with signs of sloppy, hurried stitching, probably repaired more than once, and the familiar, fading discoloration of slowly-healing fractures on his arms and legs. She'd bet all the coins in her stash that several of his ribs are recovering from being broken, too.

All the signs point to _weeks_ of abuse, given the extent of the injuries and their various states of healing. He looks like he's been run over by a semi and then dragged behind it for miles.

_What wars have you been waging, John Wick?_ she wonders.

He's also… not quite glaring, exactly, because that would require him to actually display human emotion, but he doesn't look happy with her, which she supposes is understandable. She wouldn't normally care about his emotional state, given that he's just upended her life, except that she _had_ dealt him a pretty serious blow to the head and he's lethal enough when he's not irritated.

She spares a moment to wonder if she should at least give him some water or a blanket or something before they do this.

_Priorities, Moone. _"You lost a lot of blood," she says. "I patched up what I could, but you might still die. I gotta say, that would make my life a lot easier."

Wick watches her. "I'm not here to kill you."

"If you were here to kill me, I'd be dead," she replies, then bares her teeth. "And you'd be in even worse shape than you are now."

"You should take these handcuffs off." His voice is rougher than it's ever been, and it still gives her chills.

She could. She knows he's not going to fight her again. "No," she says anyway, rubbing the bruise he'd left on her jaw. "Did the Bowery King tell you where to find me?" she continues.

"Not exactly."

"What does that mean?"

"He only told me to come to Indian Springs, and that I'd know who I was looking for when I saw them."

That certainly _sounds_ like the Bowery King's particular brand of pseudo-helpfulness. He gives _just enough_ aid to be able to claim that he did, and then demands recompense for full services rendered - she knows that because it's what he'd done for her five years ago. _Good to know at least some things never change._

Still, it seems unnecessarily vague, even for a man who lives in a sewer. "Why not just give you my name?"

Wick is silent for a moment, still studying her. She doesn't look away. "He's… _concerned_ that his network might be compromised. He didn't want to risk anyone overhearing about his plans for you." His face shifts into something that might be a grimace. "And he enjoys making my life more difficult than it needs to be."

That's interesting - she'd always thought the agents of the Bowery had an ironclad loyalty to their King. For him to suddenly be worried about leaks means something drastic must have happened. It would explain the sudden need for her services, at any rate. She files that information away for later and bites her lip, wincing when her tooth snags on the split there. "So everyone in New York still believes I'm dead?"

"Even I didn't know you were alive until I saw you in the store yesterday," Wick says.

She scowls, trying to remember when she must have passed him - it's been years since her guard has been up enough to force her to look over her shoulder everywhere she went. _Stupid, _stupid _girl, _she thinks. It's a relief to know her secrets are safe from the rest of the Underworld, but the knowledge of her own carelessness is galling. She could have lost _everything_.

In fact, that's still a distinct possibility, which leads her to her next question.

"What does he want?" It's the most pressing thing on her mind, the thing she'd mulled over and over as she'd sat in the hallway all night and watched Wick sleep, ready to spring at a moment's notice should it become necessary.

"He didn't tell me," Wick says, and she feels her hackles rise. "He only gave me your Marker and the burner phone. He wants to talk to you directly."

Madilyn's headache instantly seems to spike deeper behind her eyes. "You know,_ this_ is why I faked my own death."

Alright, so that's not _entirely_ true, but she certainly hasn't missed this element of ring-around-the-freaking-rosy, the double-talk, the subterfuge. "Pretty crappy reason to come out of retirement, Wick," she continues, massaging her temples and trying not to howl in frustration.

It would be an overstatement to say his face shutters, because that would imply it had ever been _open_, but something about his expression seems to shift, darken, and she gets the immediate impression that, somehow, she's said the wrong thing.

Her eyes catch on his left hand, and the stub of the missing ring finger that remains there - she'd noticed it last night and had been only passively confused by it, since she'd been more focused on keeping him from bleeding out. But now she remembers: he'd been _married_, that's why he'd retired in the first place; the whole Underworld had buzzed about it for ages. _The Baba Yaga got out for love,_ they all said, _he did something so terrible and impossible that even Tarasov let him walk away clean._

If he'd gone to such lengths to get out, what on earth must have happened to make him come back?

The air charges with warning, then - a jolt down her spine that tells her she needs to change the subject immediately or risk opening up a can of worms she doesn't want to get anywhere near. Whatever had actually happened to make him come back, it's not her business and she definitely, definitely doesn't want to know.

"Why send you?" she asks after a long moment. "The Bowery King's got hundreds of people on his payroll. If you're really _not_ here to kill me, then why did he send a hitman to do a courier's job?"

"I couldn't stay in the city. I guess this was his way of killing two birds with one stone."

"I didn't know you two were such close pals," Madilyn says sardonically. "You give him a Marker too, or something?"

"Not exactly."

Now _Wick_ is the one being vague. She narrows her eyes. "I heard it made Tarasov nervous when his pets worked with other major players for so long. Is he good with this little partnership of yours?"

He shifts against his cuffs as though testing them. She grips her knife tighter in response, unsure of the reasoning behind that reaction until he speaks again. "Tarasov is dead," he says, shocking her completely.

"I'm… sorry," she replies, which is both inane and a lie because she doesn't care even slightly, but she can't think of anything else to say. The Brothers Tarasov have ruled New York City with an iron fist since before she was born, but Viggo, specifically, was always at the head of things - his death must have had a catastrophic effect on the Underworld.

That information plus the news about the Bowery King starting to lose his grip on his own people, plus Wick coming back out of retirement, is starting to paint her a very dire picture of what she's potentially about to be dragged back into. The idea makes her breath catch in her chest.

"Don't be," Wick continues, and there's a new, vicious glint in his eye. "I'm the one that killed him."

Something in her goes cold, her heartbeat kicking up a staccato rhythm in her chest. It's a battle not to flinch from him, to react to the reminder that this man kills the way other people vacuum the carpet or buy groceries or _breathe_. Her eyes flick to the cuffs instinctively, making doubly sure he can't get free, before abruptly changing the subject.

"That's nice," she says. "You really don't have any idea what the Bowery King needs me for?"

The glint in his eyes fades, or more accurately recedes. Now that she's seen it, she realizes it's always there, ever lurking in the black of his pupils, a beast ready to spring free on a hair trigger. It's the only thing about him she can relate to.

"I thought you would know," he says.

"Why would I know anything about what he wants?" she scoffs. "I'm _dead_."

Even as she says this, she can feel the absence of the pendant around her neck, as well as the nagging suspicion that had made her take it off and bury it inside the mattress in her bedroom before she confronted him.

_No,_ she thinks, and not for the first time. _He can't want that_. He has no idea she has it; only Kincaid would know to look for it, and he thinks it sank to the bottom of the Hudson with her so the entire thing is moot. No, she decides, the Bowery King just needs her to retrieve something for him, that's all. That _has _to be all.

Wick pulls against the handcuffs again, dragging her from her thoughts. "You know this isn't gonna hold me forever," he says.

"It's worked fine so far," Madilyn says, inclined to watch him struggle a little longer. "Why did you need to get out of the city so badly? If one of Tarasov's people put a contract on your head, why not at least hide in the Continental? The Doc could have done a better job patching you up than I can, at any rate."

There's a sudden beat of heavy silence as he looks at her, looks _through_ her - she's able to meet his gaze and hold it, but it's not easy. They could flay a person alive, those eyes.

"I'm _excommunicado_," he finally says, and whatever she'd expected his response to be, that absolutely hadn't been it.

_Holy hell_, she thinks, heart pounding, because Winston had _loved _him - everyone knew he'd been Management's favorite. "What did you _do?_" she asks before she can stop herself, immediately knowing she won't like the answer.

She's not wrong. "I shot Santino D'Antonio in the head on Continental grounds," he says, never drawing his eyes from hers. It takes her a stunned second to register what he's said and what it means, and when she does she lurches to her feet so quickly she actually knocks her chair over. The crash echoes through the room as she paces away, trying to collect herself.

He'd made an enemy of the Camorra - the friggin' _Camorra_ \- and gotten himself barred from the only place on earth he could have taken refuge from them at the same time. Management alone is absolutely lethal when their rules are broken, but to add the fury of the _Camorra _to that equation? No wonder he looks beat to hell. She can't believe he's made it this far; the price on his head has got to be astronomical.

She's not going to ask what his reasons were - she really, _really_ doesn't want to know - but she hopes it was worth it to him, because now he's a dead man walking.

_They're all going to be coming for him,_ she thinks, _and he's in my _living room.

"Why in the _world_ would the Bowery King protect you instead of handing you over?" she demands, trying to sort her thoughts by order of importance. It's proving to be a monumentally difficult task.

"He gave me the gun," Wick says, which makes her whip around to stare at him, because the Bowery King is a lot of things but she'd never realized he was a _moron_. "The High Table took exception. They nearly killed him in retribution. Now he wants revenge."

Her blood chills again. "Wait," she says, hoping she hadn't heard what she thought she'd just heard. "Wait a _minute_, what do you mean the _High Table_ took exception? Santino's not a coronated member of the Table."

Wick just _looks _at her again, and her stomach sinks. She straightens her chair just so she has something to do with her hands and eases back down into it, trying not to be sick.

"I thought Gianna was next in line for the seat."

"I killed her too," Wick says. His voice is as impassive as it's always been, but there's something else behind his eyes, there and gone like a shooting star, that she couldn't hope to read.

She blinks at him, once, twice. "Would this conversation go faster if I asked you who was still _alive?_" Madilyn asks, hoping her voice doesn't sound as hysterical to him as it does to her.

He doesn't bother to answer, but she hadn't really expected him to. "So let me get this straight," she says, rubbing her temples again, "you went on a murder spree for what I hope was a very good reason and _not_ your own stupidity, although I'm doubting that more and more by the second, and you managed to piss off the High Table, the Camorra, _and _the Management of the New York City Continental in one single master stroke of absolute genius, which also got you excommunicated."

He pulls at his cuffs again. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

"You're an _idiot_," she says flatly, which doesn't even come close to expressing how she really feels about him, but she's still too shocked to be more articulate. "How high is the contract?"

"Fifteen million, last I checked. Could be higher, now."

She lets out the kind of curse she hasn't used since Winnie was old enough to start repeating whatever she heard. Her hands are shaking. It takes her a moment to realize it's from rage. Her eyes trail over his injuries again, and she scowls.

"So someone tried to kill you last night, which is why you broke in to my house instead of approaching me like someone with common sense, although after what I just heard I'm not sure you actually have any."

"I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance you'd either help me or try to kill me." Wick lets out a soft huff that almost sounds amused, probably because she ended up doing both, but when she looks back at his face his expression is perfectly blank.

"You could have _knocked_," she snaps.

"Would you have let me in?"

Well, he's got her there. "How did they find you? Who were they?"

"Russians. They worked for Anatoly Belikov's operation in Vegas."

She narrows her eyes at the name. "You passed through Flagstaff to get here?"

"Yeah."

"That's probably when they made you, and tracked you down from there," Madilyn says, head pounding. "Belikov's got eyes all over every major stopover in the Southwest - it's part of how he's kept his grip on Vegas for so long." She bares her teeth, fingers whitening around the knife she'd almost forgotten was in her hand. "Did you kill them, at least?"

He nods.

"All of them?" she presses. "There's no chance of anything making it back to Belikov?"

"They're dead, Moone."

She sags in relief. Really, it had been silly to doubt him - if she's learned nothing else today, it's that murder is the only thing John Wick does with any kind of skill.

"That's good," she says, then: "You _bastard_." Fury, hot and blinding, swiftly chokes out the relief - it's all she can do to keep from screaming at him. "Were you so _miserable _in your own retirement that you had to come here and ruin mine too?"

Lightning seems to flash through his eyes at her words, a warning that chills her blood as his whole body jerks at once. The muscles in his arms tense and relax, tense and relax. He's shirtless and wounded and handcuffed to a table and yet in this moment he's somehow more physically intimidating than when he'd held her by the throat.

"You have no idea," he says, very softly, growling like an animal, "what I've lost." It's possibly the first thread of genuine emotion she's gotten from him so far, and it scares the hell out of her.

_Is this guy even human?_ she wonders, fighting an urge to get up, to put a greater physical distance between them, to put a knife in his heart before he can put one in hers.

But she'll be damned if she cowers now, after everything. "I have a five-year-old daughter, you _jackass_," she spits, "how _dare_ you come here and put her in danger because of whatever idiotic war you're waging."

"She's not your daughter," he says quietly, and there's a new bite to his voice she doesn't like at _all_.

She feels her hackles rise. The knife in her fist takes on an odd weight - the Thing that hissed in her ear last night raises its head again, slows her pulse, steadies her hands. Slowly, she stands up, ears ringing, teeth bared. When she takes a step closer to him, she watches his eyes narrow - another warning, a rattlesnake shaking its tail - and feels an answering lurch in her chest. "What did you just say?"

"You stole the girl. She's not yours."

_So he does know. He's not here for her, but he does know._ She's quiet for a long, long time, watching him. He doesn't flinch or squirm under her gaze, and she doesn't expect him to.

"I did steal her, you're right," she finally says. "That's what _makes_ her mine."

With that, she turns away, pacing into the kitchen for air. She leans against the counter, fingers white-knuckled around the edge, arms shaking with tension. Her thoughts are a howl, a whirlwind spinning out of control.

_Wick and the Bowery King are the only ones who know I'm still alive. _

_The High Table wants Wick dead. _

_The Bowery King is collecting on my Marker. _

_Winnie._

Madilyn takes a sharp breath, pulls her hair out of its bun and lets it fall loose to her shoulders. Grips it, bends almost double trying to keep her composure. Questions spin through her, chief among them being _what the hell do I do now? _

The phone, the one with the Bowery King's number on it - she needs to call him before she does anything else. Frankly, she'd rather claw out her own eyes, but she has a feeling there's another layer to the King's reasoning behind sending Wick to give her the Marker, beyond just getting him out of New York - Wick is here to kill her if she refuses to honor it.

There's a part of her that would consider letting him, rather than go back - if it wasn't for Winnie.

But call or no call, Wick's presence here has complicated matters tenfold. Belikov, and probably others too, will be watching the surrounding area closely, and even if it's not her he's looking for she doesn't want to risk gaining his attention by trying to flee. Wick can't stay here, but if he goes, he'll be taking her most closely-guarded secrets with her.

_I am so, so screwed. _

She wants to be angry with him - and oh, she _is_ \- but there's a part of her that can't get the sight of his missing ring finger out of her mind. Her hand flies up to her face without her permission, rubbing the heel of her hand over the scars on her mouth. It's an old habit she's been trying to kick since she got them.

She knows, deep down, why Wick killed all those people. She knows why he would have been desperate enough, reckless enough, to murder a member of the High Table on Continental grounds. She knows why he's missing his ring finger, and she knows why he came back in the first place.

Someone had murdered his wife. She wonders if it was Tarasov - he'd certainly been cruel enough, but she had believed he'd held himself to a higher standard of honor. And she never would have guessed he'd be that stupid - not letting Wick retire would have been one thing, but letting him retire only to murder his wife afterwards? Practically suicidal.

A flicker of movement, a shadow shifting in the reflection in the ancient silver toaster in front of her, jars her back to the present. She whirls on a dime, knife raised and swinging on reflex.

She's not nearly as surprised when Wick catches her arm this time, though it's still just as infuriating as it had been when he'd done it last night. The knife slips through her sweat-soaked grip to clatter against the floor.

"You're gonna have to stop doing that," he growls - wonder of wonders, is that _annoyance_ in his voice? Her handcuffs are still dangling from his wrists, and too late she realizes the flaw in her trap - he'd freed himself by simply pushing up on the table and slipping the cuffs off the legs. _Damn. I'd have thought he was too weak to pull that off. _

"Stop giving me a reason," is the only thing she can think to say, seething with frustration.

He watches her for a long moment. "Take the handcuffs off."

"Make me." She winces almost as soon as the words leave her mouth - spending so much time around a five-year-old and practically no one else is starting to rub off on her. The look he gives her is distinctly unimpressed, although whether it's because he agrees or because he actually _can_ make her is anyone's guess.

Although, given the way he's shaking, maybe he can't. It occurs to her then that he's leaning on her less as a way to keep her pinned and more because he's unable to remain upright on his own. The bandages she'd spent nearly an hour meticulously wrapping him in are soaking through, and the wound on his thigh has left a blood trail from the living room. "How are you even _standing?_"

"Luck, I guess," he replies in a tone of voice that suggests he thinks it's anything but. He releases her arm and doesn't quite sag, exactly, but she can feel all the tension leave his body in a rush, as though he's suddenly lost every scrap of energy he's ever had. He braces himself against the counter behind her, heaving in deep, shuddering breaths that wrack his entire frame. It's only that and her hands on his bared chest that keep him from collapsing on her entirely.

It's an odd mockery of a lover's embrace - she can feel his breath fan against her throat, raising chill bumps on her skin.

… _And that's enough of that, thank you _very_ much._

Her hands move from his chest - _seriously, is this guy made of solid titanium?_ \- to his upper arms, gripping him tightly. "You need to lie back down," she says irritably, "you're not bleeding out in my kitchen. It's unsanitary."

He raises his head to look at her, and she's instantly unsettled by how close their faces are. "You need to call the Bowery King," he says. "It's kind of important."

"He's waited five years, he can wait another hour while I scrub your blood out of my carpet." She surveys him critically. "I don't suppose there's any chance of you making it back to wherever you've been staying without collapsing, is there?"

"I didn't know you cared," he huffs against the skin of her shoulder left bare by her tank top. There's no amusement in his voice, only a bone-deep exhaustion. He lurches, sways on his feet. She adjusts her grip on his arms, braces herself in an attempt to steady him. If he falls, he's going to drag both of them down.

She carefully ignores any comparisons that can be made there. "This is a small town. A strange, unfamiliar man bleeding out on the street is going to attract unwanted attention, and the last thing I need is more Russians sniffing around, wondering what's brought the infamous Baba Yaga all the way out here." She sighs. "You'll have to stay, I guess, until you look less conspicuously about to drop dead."

He tilts his head at her again, observing her quietly. She can read the question in his eyes as clearly as though he'd asked it aloud.

"In exchange," she continues, gingerly helping him sling one of his arms over her shoulders and guiding him back into the living room despite how much she'd rather just start punching him, "you are never, _ever_ going to breathe a word to anyone about me still being alive or Winnie's existence at all. Then we'll be square."

She can feel him examining her, but doesn't deign to look at him. He's still an idiot, and she's still furious that he's brought all this trouble to her door. But he would never have come here at all if it hadn't been for the Bowery King, and that's… that's technically her own fault. She'd been a fool to think he'd never collect on her Marker, a fool to think his delay was anything other than him waiting for the most advantageous moment.

She'd had no other choice at the time, but that doesn't make her current situation any easier to stomach.

Madilyn throws a few towels on the couch to catch the blood he's still somehow losing and helps Wick settle on it, then retrieves both the handcuff key and a pitcher of water from the kitchen. She frees his wrists, then shoves a glass in his hands and tells him to drink as much as he can.

If she'd taken him to a hospital, they'd probably have recommended a transfusion for all the blood he's lost, but the only thing she can do for him on her own is give him lots of fluids and stitches for his wounds and hope it helps. Worst case scenario, he dies and she has to figure out what to do with his body.

Well, okay, that's not true; the worst case scenario is that more of Belikov's friends come knocking and burn her house to the ground and haul Winnie back to -

"Have you seen a dog?" Wick's question is so unexpected she actually jumps on her way to get the first aid kit out of the bathroom.

She turns, confused. He'd felt feverish, but she hadn't thought he was all the way to the point of delirium. "What dog?"

"A pitbull. Grey. I lost track of him in the fight with Belikov's thugs last night."

"_You_ have a dog?" Somehow that surprises her. Maybe it shouldn't - as familiar as she is with his reputation, she doesn't actually _know _anything about him.

At his answering nod, she shakes her head. "I haven't."

If this bothers him, he doesn't show it, only grunts and doesn't speak again. She's grateful he doesn't press, since she isn't comfortable with the idea of a pitbull near her daughter. Knowing Wick, it's probably a vicious attack dog, trained to kill on command.

When she comes back into the living room, Wick has relaxed back against the arm of the sofa, his eyes heavy-lidded with exhaustion. He's going to need clothes, Madilyn acknowledges half-absently, and she's running out of bandages - she'll need to make another run to the store soon.

She watches his eyes flutter shut, and frowns, stepping closer. "Wick," she calls, and he snaps back to alertness at the ire in her tone. "I bandaged you up last night because I needed you alive to talk," she says, "but I'm not your nurse. Patch yourself up before you get even more blood on my sofa." She tosses the first aid kit at him and he catches it, blinking rapidly but giving no other sign that anything about his situation is amiss. She wonders if he keeps the same blank expression when he kills, or if his victims are granted the privilege of seeing something human on the Baba Yaga's face in their last moments.

Somehow she doubts it.

"Thanks," he says gruffly, before reaching down to unwind the bandages on his thigh. She almost turns away, the necessity of her involvement finished, when she catches sight of his back and the tattoos pressed into the skin there.

They're old, she can see that immediately, faded black and smattered with scars of various sizes and lengths. He has what looks vaguely like the image of a burning torch on his left shoulder blade, and the head of a howling wolf on his right. Between the two images arc the words _fortis fortuna adiuvat_, and all of this sets over a pair of hands clasped in prayer before a crucifix - part of which, inexplicably, looks like it's been recently burned away. _Yikes_.

It's the Latin that catches her attention and holds it, however:_ Fortune favors the bold._ She has to bite back a snort of derision as she turns away, unwilling to stand the sight of him any longer. In her experience, fortune favors whoever the hell it feels like favoring, and the bold die just as badly as anyone else.

A pair of eyes, green as spring, flash in her memory. She has to dig her nails into her palms to keep from rubbing at her scars again.

Instead, she moves back down the hall for the cleaning supplies, and tries to ignore the way the blood trail flows nearly to Winnie's door.

* * *

**A/N: Hope you guys enjoyed! More of the Bowery King's plot will be revealed in the next chapter, so stay tuned, and please let me know your thoughts!**

**Thanks to everyone who favorited and reviewed! You guys are so very kind!**

**Sincerely,**

**Starcrier. **


	4. Chapter IV

_fearful symmetry_

Chapter IV

Madilyn spends, perhaps, more time than is strictly necessary cleaning up Wick's mess. The man himself has passed out again on the couch, and without his cold, empty gaze on her it's a lot easier to pretend like her world isn't about to erupt. She scrubs the carpet, shampoos it, vacuums until it's cleaner than it's been in years, and all the while ignores the way urgency pounds at the back of her skull.

Unfortunately, however, "cleaning up blood" is on the laundry list of random things she excels at, so despite the sheer quantity Wick had left all over the living room and the hallway, the process doesn't take nearly as long as she'd like. All too soon the blood is gone - even though somehow there's _still_ leftover glitter - and she's left without an excuse to pick up the phone. It's just sitting on the kitchen counter, mocking her. She considers throwing it down the garbage disposal just for the hell of it.

_Ugh_, she thinks, managing to quell the urge just in time to keep from acting on it, instead sweeping the stupid thing off the counter and into her pocket before heading into her bedroom to change into actual clothes, rather than the bloodstained, sweat-soaked loungewear she'd spent a sleepless, watchful night in.

Afterwards, she gathers Winnie from her room and, without thinking about it too hard, takes her out to the backyard. They spend most of the morning just playing, swinging on the monkey bars on the playset and sliding down the slide, jumping rope and playing hopscotch and holding cartwheel competitions. Between the two of them, Winnie is the undefeated Cartwheeling Champion; Madilyn - whose personal record for Most Consecutive Cartwheels Without Puking is one-hundred-and-twenty-three, on a dare from one of the other kids in the Den which involved winning first lockpicking rights to the pantry that week - doesn't consider this so much_ letting her win_ as _building her confidence_.

Winnie doesn't ask about Wick again, but Madilyn can see her glancing through the dining room windows every now and again, trying to catch a glimpse of him sleeping. Winnie is not often exposed to people other than Madilyn or Natalie or the neighbors, which the parenting books would probably say isn't _great _for her development, but none of those parenting books were written by people with the kind of enemies Madilyn has.

_Or_, she thinks sardonically of the Bowery King, _the kind of friends_. She knows Wick is simply a novelty to Winnie, as all new people are, but Madilyn loathes him all the more for it, for being a source of fascination to her daughter when his very presence here could get her killed, or worse.

Still, Winnie doesn't push, perhaps sensing her mother's irritation even if she doesn't understand it, for which Madilyn is more grateful than she can say. She's running out of innocent explanations for the bloody, half-dead assassin on their couch.

They stop for lunch a little after noon - sandwiches and lemonade, a traditional favorite, even if Winnie does always complain she makes the lemonade too sour - and by then the anxiety pulsing under Madilyn's skin is too powerful to ignore. With a sigh, she drags out the sprinkler from behind the shed and slathers Winnie in so much sunscreen she looks like a ghost, before turning her loose. Winnie shrieks with delight as the cold water soaks her instantly to the bone.

"Are you gonna play too, Mommy?" Winnie calls.

"In a minute," Madilyn replies, settling herself on one of the worn sun chairs. "Mommy needs to make a phone call first." She's put it off long enough; these last few hours have been a way to snatch just a bit more normalcy from the gaping maw of her past, which now threatens to consume them all - a last reprieve with her daughter before everything goes inevitably to hell.

_But I have promises to keep,_ Madilyn thinks, _and miles to go before I sleep._ She withdraws the phone from her pocket and turns it over and over in her hand contemplatively, watching her own fingers tremble with an almost clinical air..

"Who are you calling?" Winnie asks in that idle way of children who don't care so much about the answer as they do asking the question. The parenting books say it's more about interaction, and building their conversational skills. It's why Winnie's many (many, _many_) questions never really irritate her.

Her tolerance is also partially a spite thing, another casual _screw you_ to her foster father and the rest of the Den, who were quick with a backhand if you asked too many questions or said the wrong thing or breathed too loudly. Madilyn has resolved, among other things, to be a good mom if it kills her, if for no other reason than that Erik would hate it.

"A friend," Madilyn lies.

"What friend?"

"He's from all the way in New York City. Remember how Mommy told you she used to work there before you were born?"

"Yeah, in the Big Apple!" Winnie crows, just before giving a very impressive leap for a five year old over the sprinkler head. She lands on the other side only to slip in the fresh mud and land on her bottom with a splat. Madilyn thinks most kids would have been at least a _little_ stunned, but Winnie only giggles madly and flexes her muddy fingers, thrilled about the mess.

"Yep, the Big Apple," she says, laughing despite herself.

"Is Mr. John from there too?" Winnie asks.

It probably _had_ been too much to hope that she'd lose interest in him entirely. "Yes," Madilyn says. "I'm calling my friend to make sure he gets back home okay." This, at least, is not technically a lie. One of the first things she plans on addressing with the Bowery King is getting John Wick the hell out of her life as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, Winnie has distracted herself by inspecting the wet ground around her for worms, and doesn't pursue that line of inquiry any further. Madilyn keeps a careful eye on her as she flips the phone open - Winnie had tried to _eat_ one last time, for reasons known only to her since she's just about the pickiest kid on the planet in any other context. She won't eat fruit without essentially being bribed, but _earthworms_ are fine.

She's the weirdest little kid, sometimes. Madilyn is shaken to the core for love of her.

It's that love that navigates to the contacts page of the cell phone and presses _dial_, that keeps it pressed to her ear as it rings. And rings. And rings.

She's about to hang up and try again later when the dial tone cuts out with a soft click. A beat later, a quiet inhale echoes down the line. "Well," greets the familiar baritone of the elusive, reclusive Bowery King, "it's about damn time. I was beginning to think Wick got himself killed before he could find you."

Madilyn is instantly transported back to five years ago, when she'd trembled in her sodden clothes, a squalling Winifred tucked under her left arm, a bloody Marker extended in her right. The weight of his gaze had seemed to bore straight through her, and his answer had been a gavel going down, either to accept her offering to help her flee the city or cast her back out into the darkness and Kincaid. Luckily for her, he'd chosen the first option.

But everything, even good fortune, comes with a price.

"Your Highness," Madilyn responds dryly, ignoring the quick-fire pace of her heart as best she can. "It's been a while."

"Too long, Miss Moone," he replies. There's a strange, unfamiliar shallowness to his breathing. What was it Wick had said? _The High Table took exception. _She shudders.

"How's our mutual friend?" the King continues. She doesn't have to ask who he's talking about.

"More of an ass than I remember," Madilyn says, and nothing else. His responding laugh booms in her ear.

"I bet you told him that to his face, didn't you? Now that I would have paid to see," he chuckles. "I'm guessing he told you about some of the unfortunate predicament he's found himself in."

"He told me enough," Madilyn replies. "You sent him with my Marker. Why?"

"Well aren't you straight to the point?" he says. "You and Wick got that in common."

Madilyn doesn't reply, only waits, watching Winnie shake her hair like a dog to rid herself of excess water. The effectiveness of this is somewhat in question since she's still standing directly in front of the sprinkler.

"You manage to keep that kid alive all these years?"

There's another single silent beat, but this time it's charged, electric. "_Why?_" Madilyn asks again. This time it comes out like a hiss, like a growl.

"Easy, easy, Moone," says the King, all dripping with mockery. "I know better than to take from the dragon's hoard."

_Dragon's hoard._ She tilts her head, curious despite herself at the idea. The creature within her _does_ feel like a dragon from Winnie's storybooks, sometimes - certainly she's felt rage enough to breathe fire, certainly she's possessive enough, greedy enough. Or maybe it's _not_ greed that made her the best at stealing but _instinct_, something much deeper within her that was wired that way, can't do anything else.

"Then what do you want?" She refrains from snapping only because he has the ability to make her life deeply unpleasant, and in fact is already doing so without trying very hard.

"I heard a _fascinating_ rumor, after you left," the Bowery King drawls, "that Kincaid's baby girl wasn't the only thing you took from him that dark and stormy night."

_No, _she thinks, feeling herself pale with shock. _How could he know? _

Her fist clenches so tightly around the phone she knows her knuckles have gone white. "I don't know what you mean," she lies, very calmly.

"Kincaid never said nothing to nobody, of course," he continues as though she hadn't spoken, "he knows he'd never survive admitting he lost it, but you do _hear_ things, you know, when you got eyes and ears and pigeons all over the city."

Again, she doesn't answer, but if there's one thing the Bowery King loves as much as being dramatic, it's the sound of his own voice. "I heard that you practically snatched his soul out from under him."

That's not a bad way to put it, she supposes - it's a shame she has to deny it. "I'm not in the business of stealing souls, Your Highness. I leave that sort of thing to men like Wick."

"In almost thirty years, nobody's ever been brave enough to take a potshot at that bastard," he says, ignoring her again and chuckling as though at a private joke. "And you just swept in and took it, _and_ his kid. You're ballsier than most, I'll give you that - I just hope you had enough sense to bleed whoever put you up to it _dry_."

She flinches instinctively, as though it's somehow possible to physically recoil from a memory. The Bowery King doesn't know her motivation behind anything that had happened that night five years ago, and had only gotten involved when she'd dragged herself to his doorstep asking for a way out. His statements, while not incorrect, do not paint an accurate picture of the whole story, but one thing he's right about is how unprecedented - with good reason - her actions had been at the time.

Henry Kincaid can be accurately summed up as an accountant - but the truth of him reaches much deeper than that. He runs the books for just about every major player in the Underworld, and it falls to him to keep the blood-soaked, vice-infested ledgers sparkling clean and running smoothly. He's a launderer, financial adviser, auditor and even bookie all in one, and in a world where wealth is power, he's _untouchable_.

_Or at least,_ she thinks with a private note of dark satisfaction, _he was_.

Still, it's not like she's about to just _admit_ to it. "And just what is it you think I took?"

He gives a beleaguered, rattling sigh. "Henry Kincaid kept leverage on every member of the High Table," he says very slowly, like he's talking to an idiot. "Blackmail, bribes, hidden funds, hush money, private account numbers, the works. He made himself a cozy little nest egg at the top of the food chain. Most of the Table would think twice before moving against him with the kind of dirt he's got." He pauses significantly, then continues. "Lucky for Kincaid, nobody knows he doesn't have it anymore. Rumor has it a certain Blackbird swiped it from him."

Madilyn bends down, gripping her hair. She can't believe he _knows_ \- more pressingly, she can't believe he's just sat on this information for five years without using it. He could have demanded it from her at literally _any time_. Why wait?

She thinks of everything Wick had told her, about how both D'Antonios are dead, about Tarasov and _excommunicado_ and Wick's dead wife. She thinks about the shaky rasp of the Bowery King's breath in her ear, and wonders if that isn't the answer. And then she thinks about Winnie.

Always, always Winnie.

The lie springs to her lips as easily as breathing, so quickly and fluidly she can half-convince herself it's true. "You're right, I stole it," she allows herself to concede, and it's... _complicated_ but not the part of this story that's false, "but I don't have it anymore. I lost it in the river - it must have fallen out of my bag when I was trying to get the kid out of the car. I didn't know it was missing until later."

There's a long, long silence. Winnie has gone back to entertaining herself with cartwheels, flinging mud everywhere in the process. Her curls are soaked to her scalp, the water turning them russet-red like streaks of old blood.

Her hair had looked much the same after Madilyn had pulled them both out of the Hudson. Her skin, however, had been blue, her eyes closed, her little chest still. She'd screamed for _hours_ after Madilyn had managed, by accident or miracle or sheer dumb luck, to expel the water from her lungs. To this day she's never heard a sweeter sound.

"Now that's just too bad," the Bowery King says, drawing her from her thoughts. There's a casual note in his voice, but something dark and cold lurks just underneath it. "Because having information like that would have made my little skirmish with the High Table a hell of a lot easier."

"I'm sorry to disappoint," Madilyn says. Her mouth has gone dry with an old emotion she can't quite place. Maybe it's dread.

"I'm sorry too," he replies, "because I still got a lot of work to do here. If you can't help me get that leverage I need, I'm guessing I'm gonna have to go straight to the source."

Something deep within her goes abruptly still. "What do you mean?"

"I'm thinking Kincaid would be mighty _grateful_ to any Good Samaritan who let him know his daughter is still alive. I figure he'd give me just about anything I wanted in exchange for that information. Wouldn't be as good as having what you took from him, of course, but I'd be able to work with it."

Madilyn's ears start to ring, sharply and suddenly. There's a strange, drawn-out beat where the world goes fuzzy and white at the edges, where she can't hear or see or move or _think_. When she comes back to herself seconds or hours later she realizes that she's doubled over in her seat like she's been gut-punched and is similarly unable to catch her breath.

"Moone? You still with me?" The Bowery King's voice rings hollowly down the line.

_Calm down_, she thinks, even as her heart threatens to stop in her chest, _you have always known he could do this. This has always been a possibility. _

There's a difference, though, between thinking about it objectively and experiencing it firsthand, and the chasm between those two things is expansive enough to drown her.

"You _bastard_," she manages on a ragged exhale.

"You think I _want_ to deal with Kincaid if I don't have to?" the Bowery King says. "I'd much rather do things the easy way. Think long and hard here, Moone. Are you sure you don't have the information I want? _Absolutely_ sure?" The condescension in his voice is scathing.

"I might," she says after a long moment, teeth gritted so hard her jaw aches, "have what you're looking for."

_For all the good it will do you,_ she thinks, clenching her hands into fists.

"Now that's _very_ good to hear," says the Bowery King. The smug, pleased grin in his voice is impossible to miss. Fortunately, he's smart enough not to draw it out; now that he's gotten the answer he'd wanted, his tone shifts into something more businesslike. "What kind of state is Mr. Wick in?"

It's a testament to the kind of scrapes Wick must consistently get himself into that the Bowery King feels the need to ask this without knowing the situation that had led him to her door last night in the first place. "Not a great one."

He _hmms_. "Try to keep him alive, as best you can, then come back to New York with him as soon as he's well enough to travel. I might need your particular skill set for what's coming."

She'd thought this conversation couldn't possibly go any worse - it's nice to know she can still be surprised. "_What?_" she snarls. "I'll send the information back with him, if that's what you want, but I'm not going back to New York."

"You'll damn well do whatever I say you will until I've Marked that your debt's paid," he snaps back. "The way I see it, I got five years worth of interest to collect on. Or," he says, deceptively casual, "I can just have Wick put a bullet in your head and bring the leverage _and_ the kid back to New York, that way you never have to come back, how's that?"

The threat is enough to stop the breath in her lungs. She'd meant what she'd told Wick, this morning - if he really wanted to kill her, he could do it and no amount of her struggling would even slow him down. And then Winnie would be handed back to Kincaid, or worse, and everything, _everything_ would have been for nothing.

It can't be allowed to happen. But the concept of New York is just as daunting, or nearly, in her mind.

"Please don't do this," she says softly. Madilyn has begged, that she can remember, on exactly two other occasions in her entire life. The words taste like bile in her throat, but she forces them out anyway. "If you need a thief, I can give you names. You don't need me. Don't," she pauses, breathes, swallows back a scream, "don't ask me to go back there."

"Everything has a price, Moone," the Bowery King says coldly, echoing her earlier thoughts. "Even death."

She doesn't trust herself to reply for fear she'll start screaming and won't be able to stop. It's all she can do to just keep breathing.

"Are you okay, Mommy?" Madilyn jumps, startled in a way she rarely is - in her distraction she hadn't noticed Winnie make her way across the yard to stand in front of her until she'd spoken. Her thumb is in her mouth, a sign that all the activity of the day is getting to her. Madilyn glances at her watch and realizes it's almost an hour past her scheduled afternoon nap. She's going to be an absolute terror at bedtime tonight.

"I'm fine, Lamb," Madilyn whispers, pulling the phone slightly away from her ear. "Come here." She pulls Winnie into her lap, heedless of how wet and muddy she is, and holds her close, rests her head on hers. She wishes she could pull her daughter into herself, shelter her within her ribcage so that no one could reach her. The grasping, possessive impulse is an unhealthy one - Madilyn _knows _that, she does. She just can't do anything about it.

"Keep this phone on you," the Bowery King continues. "I'll call again soon."

She still doesn't reply - there's nothing else for her to say. It's just as well, because in the next instant the line goes unceremoniously dead. Madilyn closes the phone, tucks it away, leans back with Winnie in her arms.

She doesn't move for a long, long time.

* * *

Eventually, lulled by the excitement of her morning and the cheerful warmth of the sun above them, Winnie dozes off in her lap. Madilyn should wake her, she knows, or at least take her inside to clean her up before putting her down for the rest of her nap in her own bed.

But Wick is inside and now more than ever she wants him nowhere near her daughter, so she does neither of those things, instead reclining the chair as far back as it will go before extricating herself from Winnie's hold and laying her down on it. Madilyn drags the tattered patio umbrella over to her so that she won't be completely exposed to the scorching Nevada sun, and then stands there for a moment, just watching her.

Anger, thick and hot as a fever, pulses beneath her skin so thickly she's nearly sick with it. She wants to rip something apart, to scream at the top of her lungs, to hit something until her knuckles shatter. The feeling is familiar and so is burying it deep until it's nothing but a buzzing in her chest, deeper still until she feels nothing at all.

In this as in everything, she reaches for mental collection of poetry, which she tends to recite like prayers when any excess of emotion threatens to bubble out of her. _Neruda_, she decides, mentally running through his familiar collection of sonnets, timing her breathing with the meter of the lines. "Walking Around" feels particularly apt, in tone if not in theme - _It would be fine to go through the streets with a green knife, letting out yells until I died of cold, _she thinks, fighting an urge to do just that.

But this is an old exercise, and she's very good at it. All the highest and lowest points in her life are touched, studded, engraved with poetry, the words as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. It's the one thing the Den had never been able to take from her. Erik had tried, loathing any coping mechanism his charges put to use that made it easier for them to defy him or better endure his more creative punishments, but he'd ultimately been unsuccessful.

Sighing, she turns to the shed on the back corner of the property, and resolutely does not think of the impending doom looming like a mushroom cloud on the horizon of her life. When it reaches her, it will bring death with it, but for now, her hatred and her wrath and her sheer, heartrending horror are walled off behind glass - to acknowledge but not to feel.

When she'd first bought the house, she'd converted the unconventionally large shed into a tiny workout space of sorts, where she can exercise and store her more elaborate training equipment, like the balance beam and the high bars and the springboards. She can and does spend hours out here at a time exercising while Winnie naps or colors on the back porch or swings on the swingset.

Today, however, she just drags out the mats and one of the high bars to the narrow dirt track by the back fence she'd cleared out years ago. It's still incredibly hot out, but there's a strong crossbreeze and thick clouds coming in from the west, so she doesn't imagine it will remain that way for very long - and anyway, it doesn't matter, because putting herself through her paces is the only way she's going to be able to think.

Just because Madilyn had never wanted to go back to her old life doesn't mean she'd let herself forget the skills she'd learned there, and anyway, she wouldn't know how to do so even if she'd wanted to. Her routines, which had been designed to build muscle and keep her flexible from the time she was old enough to speak, are as much a part of her bodily processes as the heart that pumps blood through her veins.

She's taught Winnie some, too, as she's grown, but it's… that's a process, because Madilyn has to learn to teach differently than the way _she'd _been taught, which involved methods that her foster father called_ highly effective_ but that the authors of her parenting books would call _horrific abuse_. Mostly she just teaches Winnie basic stretches and tumbling techniques and waits for her to grow a little more, and for her own heart to stop pounding in her chest whenever she thinks about Winnie ending up like her: a cold, broken shell of a thing that doesn't know how to do anything but _take_.

It's okay, though, because there are other things Madilyn can teach her - how to escape from a stranger's grip, where and how hard to hit in order to get free, when to stay quiet and when to scream for help, how to move through a room without making a sound. They're working on "magic" right now, which is what Winnie calls the little tricks Madilyn knows how to do, like making something appear in her hand, or disappear with a twist of her fingers. Winnie's not very good at it yet, since her fine motor control is still developing, but she's making progress.

Now Madilyn wonders if she shouldn't be teaching her more about how to fight, about weapons, about the damage her teeth and nails can do if applied with the necessary amount of force, about how to run and run and run without looking back.

But then she thinks about the glitter that had streaked her face yesterday and wants to be sick. No, she can't do it - Winnie needs to be a child, not the thing Madilyn is capable of twisting her into, not someone who jumps at shadows, not the thing that lurks within them.

Madilyn had promised as much, after all.

Gritting her teeth, she stretches, dusts her hands with chalk and strips off her shirt, leaving her only in a dark sports bra and leggings, and then hoists herself up onto the bar in one easy swing. She curls around it and lets the momentum spin her a few times, orienting herself, and then relaxes, flipping herself up and over, up and over, one-handed and cross-armed and then no hands at all, only catching herself at the last second before crashing to the mat. She loses herself and time and the world like this, loses her sense of self, of the crushing heat and the breath in her lungs and the danger at her door. There is only Madilyn, and the bar, and what she has to do to stay connected to it.

Well, that, and also the inescapable, echoing thought that she wants to kill the Bowery King. It won't leave her alone, won't leave her mind no matter how many turns she takes on the bar, and it's bewildering, despite everything. She's not a killer.

Alright, she so she _is_, but that's not usually how she resolves her problems. Murder has always been circumstantial, a last resort to escape or defend herself, never premeditated. And obviously she _can't _kill the Bowery King. Even if, by some miracle, she got the opportunity to try, he's got scores of people under his command - she'd never get close enough to land the blow, and that's _without_ taking his new best friend the Boogeyman into account.

So. Murdering him is out of the question, no matter how badly she wants to do it. But he knows too much, has too much power over her, and if something happens Winnie will be left completely defenseless. If Madilyn wasn't in the way, he'd hand her back over to Kincaid without a second thought in the interest of earning himself an ally, no matter what he'd claimed about not wanting to deal with him directly.

_I need to make sure that can't happen_, she thinks as she flips herself up into a perfect handstand on the bar, on leg bent, the other stretched to the sky. _Somehow, I've got to get leverage._

She wonders if there's any dirt on the Bowery King buried in the data she'd stolen from Kincaid. Surely there must be - someone as high up on the food chain as he is has to have funneled money through Kincaid at some point, nearly all the bosses do. She wonders if that's part of why the Bowery King had asked for it.

It's a pointless thing to wonder, considering. He's in for a nasty surprise the moment he plugs in the thumb drive, disguised as a pendant in the shape of a springing tiger, she'd stolen - but she'll be damned if she lets him know that. He can go to hell, and his plans and threats with him.

_Sic the Baba Yaga on me, will you?_ she thinks with a sneer, twisting around and resuming her routine.

She doesn't stop for what feels like ages, until she can't ignore the burning in her arms or the heave of her lungs or the sweat dripping down her body any longer. Her endurance tends to be stronger than this, but she's been awake for going on thirty hours now, and her entire body still aches from her fight with Wick. She knows she's finally hit her limit when she comes back down from a complicated flip only for her stinging, sweaty palms to slip off the bar, causing her to slam against the mat below her with a heavy _thud_. The impact drives the breath from her lungs for dizzying moments. Her vision spirals, the clouds overhead spinning endlessly.

_Where is my halcyon blue? The grudging sky is overcast,_ she thinks, dazed.

For a while she just lays there, trying to regain her equilibrium, trying not to think. Her muscles twitch and jump from exertion. A breeze cools her soaked skin, easing the sting of the relentless sunlight overhead. She's so very, very tired.

_I don't want to go back_, she thinks. It's a plaintive, aimless thought, desperate in its emptiness.

She's almost succeeded in regulating her breathing when the sound of a dog barking nearby snaps her back to alertness. Madilyn rockets upright so quickly she makes herself dizzy, gaze locked on the open gate at the back corner of the house where the source of the barking stands, panting and wagging its tail. She's somehow not surprised at all to realize it's a grey Pitbull.

"Mommy, look, a doggy!" She jerks sharply at the sound of Winnie's voice - how long she's been awake, Madilyn has no idea, but now she's as alert as ever and racing towards the dog excitedly.

"Winnie, wait!" she calls, scrambling up to intercept her, certain for a horror-filled moment she's about to watch the dog rip her daughter's throat open.

But he only yips once and wags his tail harder, plopping down to sit on the ground as Winnie approaches. Thankfully, she seems to recall what Madilyn had drilled into her about confronting unfamiliar dogs - she holds her hand out for him to sniff, patiently allowing him to get acquainted with her scent. The dog examines it for only a moment before licking at her fingers in an approximation of canine acceptance, and Winnie giggles.

_Maybe he only attacks on command,_ Madilyn thinks, nearly lightheaded with relief as she skids to a stop next to them.

"He doesn't have a collar," Winnie says, scratching behind his ears. His back foot thumps on the ground in apparent pleasure. "That means we can keep him, right?"

"Nice try, kiddo," Madilyn replies dryly. "I think this dog belongs to Mr. John."

"He does."

The words are so quiet Madilyn almost doesn't hear them, but the distinctive rasp gets her attention, makes her whip around to see Wick standing in the back doorway, watching them. He's leaning heavily on the frame, looking no better or worse than he had this morning. His eyes are locked on the dog, who at once bolts like a dark streak of lightning in his direction, whining and wagging his tail. Wick kneels down with a slight wince of pain to meet him, giving him several brisk pats and rubs while the dog licks his face a frankly excessive - and gross - number of times. The sight of John Wick displaying tenderness of any kind is so bizarre that Madilyn almost wonders if she'd knocked herself out when she fell and is now dreaming.

"What's his name?" Winnie asks, taking a couple of eager steps in their direction before Madilyn scoops her up to prevent her from getting there.

Wick looks up at her with a typically inscrutable expression - but if Madilyn didn't know better, she might have said he was surprised that Winnie had spoken to him. "He doesn't have one," he says, which is the first thing about this entire situation that doesn't surprise her.

Winnie scowls. "How come?"

"Winnie," Madilyn says. Just because Winnie's questions don't bother her doesn't mean they won't bother Wick, and anyway she doesn't want her interacting with him. But Wick, for his part, only shrugs.

"Never found a good one."

Winnie tilts her head, considering this. "Can I do it?"

"_Winifred,_" Madilyn says again. "You can't name other people's pets for them."

"It's alright," Wick says, but Madilyn bristles anyway when he turns back to Winnie. "If you think of a good name, let me know."

"Okay!" she says brightly, then changes the subject in that abrupt way only children can. "Do you wanna play in the sprinkler with me and Mommy?"

Madilyn might, in the haze of her mortification, be imagining the way his lips twitch at one corner. "Maybe another time."

"We're done in the sprinkler for today anyway, Lamb," Madilyn says abruptly, moving toward the door and deliberately not making eye contact with Wick. He seems to get the message and moves out of her way so she can pass.

"How come?" Winnie says again, leaning her head back on Madilyn's shoulder. Madilyn gathers what little cheerfulness she can scrape together before answering.

"Because we don't want you to burn to a crunchy crisp," she says, tapping her on the nose. "We can't have all of you turning red as your hair, people will think you're a tomato and try to put you on a sandwich."

Winnie scrunches her nose. "No they won't!"

"Yes they will, I've seen it happen. It's not pretty."

"Mommy, stop _lying!_" She's giggling, though, and the subject of the sprinkler is forgotten. Winnie endures her bath and change of clothes with only minimal fussing about the temperature of the water or the fabric of the t-shirt Madilyn picks out, and afterwards settles easily enough at the play table in her bedroom with her crayons and a Disney princess coloring book.

When Madilyn emerges back into the living room, it's to see that Wick has seated himself once more on the sofa, the nameless dog curled against him with his head in his lap. She grimaces, but it's not like the couch can get dirtier at this point, so she swallows back her irritation and moves into the kitchen.

"That thing better be housetrained," is all she says, pouring herself a massive glass of water and gulping it down in huge swallows. She's exhausted and sweaty and she wants today to not have happened.

"He is," Wick says.

"How did he even find you?"

Wick shrugs. "He's a good dog," he says, like that answers the question.

"If he bites Winnie, I'll kill him," Madilyn replies, scowling.

"He doesn't bite," Wick says, and there's a sharp, dark note in his voice that makes her turn to face him. His eyes are burning, apparently at her threat - she's stunned to discover there's something that can make the Baba Yaga _feel_ after all.

"I find that hard to believe," she says.

"Because he's a Pitbull?"

"Because he's _your _dog."

Wick watches her. "He's not an attack dog. He's just a pet."

Madilyn is about to express further disbelief when she recalls the conclusions she'd come to this morning. _Oh,_ she thinks, _the dog must have belonged to his wife._ It would explain Wick's attachment and the dog's apparent lack of any actual purpose.

She turns back again, washing her glass just so she has something to do with her hands, when he speaks again. "You called the Bowery King."

It's not a question, but she answers anyway. "Yep."

When she doesn't elaborate, he presses on. "What did he want?"

"What men like him always want," she says, and nothing else.

"That's not an answer."

_How does that feel, Wick?_ she wants to sneer. _Evasiveness isn't so fun when you're on the receiving end, huh? _

"It sure isn't," she says brightly, mood lifted exponentially at the thought.

"Moone," he says. She can't tell if it's a plea or a warning and she's inclined to ignore it, except she sort of wants to gauge his reaction to the truth.

"He wants what I stole from Kincaid," she murmurs.

When she looks back at him, his brow is furrowed in confusion. "What, the kid?"

_So he really doesn't know about the pendant._ That's good information to have. "No."

There's a shooting-star of annoyance across his expression before it goes blank again. It's incredibly gratifying.

"It also turns out I am your nurse after all," she continues. "His Highness has decided it's my job to keep you alive and then go back to New York with you when you're all better, isn't that nice?" She tries not to think too hard about her own words, or else she might do something stupid, like be sick all over the floor.

"You don't want to go back there," he says, and this _is_ a warning. She lets out a semi-hysterical laugh in response.

"I really, really don't," she says. "But what I want doesn't matter."

He watches her for a long, long time. Madilyn is struck with sudden awareness that she's standing before him in only leggings and a sports bra, that a lot of skin and scars are on display. His eyes never wander from her face, but all at once she feels so vulnerable she wants to claw her own skin off. How can he be in almost the exact same state of undress and still look as composed and untouchable as though he was in one of his suits?

"I'm sorry," he says finally. There's no emotion behind it, it's a flat statement of fact, but she knows immediately, without knowing how she knows, that he's sincere.

"Go to hell," she replies.

Her response doesn't seem to shock or annoy him. He only inclines his head at her and sinks back against the couch again, closing his eyes and stroking his dog.

They don't speak again for the rest of the day.

* * *

**A/N: Here it is y'all! Updates will be pretty sporadic from here on out, but rest assured I am posting as fast as my schedule will allow! I hope you enjoyed!**

**Special thanks to everyone who read and reviewed! You guys are the fuel in my fire!**

**Sincerely,**

**Starcrier.**


	5. Chapter V

_fearful symmetry_

Chapter V

It's dark, and Indian Springs is even quieter than usual. The only sounds Madilyn can hear are the buzzing of the ancient street lights overhead, and, distantly, crickets. The rickety old motel forms a yawning half-circle before her, sleepy and still.

She's honestly not sure how the place is still in business - Mrs. Jenkins must only get a couple of guests a month, and even those don't tend to stay very long, which is why it's so concerning that Wick had, apparently, been there for the better part of two weeks. She supposes it's a good thing that he's secretly couchridden in her house, if only so he no longer runs the risk of attracting attention by simply being here - although that's the only upside of the entire arrangement she can see.

It's only been three days since he showed up, and it's already been the longest seventy-two hours of her life just because it's _him_. He's healing, but slowly, and mercifully keeping to himself, but since she's sick of looking at his bare chest and stupid tattoos she'd resolved to fetch the rest of this things from his motel room.

Unfortunately, she can't be seen doing that, which means she has to go at night, and Winnie can under no circumstances come with her. So she'd waited until her daughter had drifted off to sleep, secure in Madilyn's bed where she'd been sleeping since Wick had first arrived, and then slipped from the room, locking the door from the inside.

Wick had been awake and watching her as she'd passed through the living room to leave, his nameless dog curled at the end of the sofa by his feet. "I'll be right back," she'd murmured. "Don't wake my kid up."

She'd left before he could reply, unease with the entire situation humming like a plucked string beneath her skin. But, as loathe as she is to admit it, she's starting to realize Wick isn't a threat to Winnie.

Well, okay, he _is_, his very presence in her home is a threat, but it's not an active one. He would absolutely without question murder them both without flinching if the Bowery King told him to do so, but she doesn't think he particularly wants to - at least not Winnie. Hopefully, that will be enough to keep her daughter safe, at least until she returns tonight.

Sighing, Madilyn is careful to stick to the shadows as she makes her way to the end of the building, keeping a watchful eye on the office where Mrs. Jenkins must be watching TV, if the blue-white flashes she can see through the drawn blinds are any indication. She'd run this place with her husband and son, once upon a time, up until her son - according to the town's incessant rumor mill - had left for parts of the world that could actually be considered populated and her husband had dropped dead of a heart attack.

It's sad how alone she is, and at any other time Madilyn would allow herself to feel a twinge of her usual sympathy over the situation, but tonight Mrs. Jenkins' isolation works in her favor.

Silently as a ghost, she steals around the side of the building to the back lot, overgrown with weeds and shrubbery almost over her head and littered with trash. The motel is on the very outskirts of town, and there is nothing behind it for miles and miles.

Overhead, there's a waning gibbous moon, bathing everything in a silver-bright glow, and the stars, untouched by light pollution, are brilliantly clear. She stands for a moment, watching, oddly breathless as she stares out into the oblivion beyond. _The star of the unconquer'd will / he rises in my breast,_ she thinks, _Serene, and resolute, and still / And calm, and self-possess'd._

She turns back to the building and the row of windows, one for each unit, set into the wall. Madilyn, who once regularly broke into areas locked down tightly enough to make Fort Knox seem like a 7/11, considers the single ancient camera on the front of the motel genuinely laughable in terms of security.

A miniscule threat, however, is still a threat to be addressed. And if those Russian thugs Wick had allegedly traded blows with had found him here, she doesn't want to be caught on camera anywhere near a place he could be traced to. So while the locks on each of the front doors are so easy to pick they can barely be considered locks at all, Madilyn is taking no chances. She steps up to the window of the very last room on the row where Wick had said his room was, and withdraws the thin strip of metal from the outer pocket of her leggings, slipping it between the place where the upper and lower windows meet. The latch is very old, rusted and painted over more than once, and the window itself is poorly maintained, so it takes her several annoying seconds to work the strip back and forth, gritting her teeth and muttering curses under her breath as she fights to get the latch to pull back.

_I am _not _about to be beaten by a window installed before the invention of the airplane,_ she thinks, just as the latch finally springs free. The movement is so sudden her elbow bangs sharply against the glass, a dull thunk that sounds thunderous in the stillness of the night around her. She freezes even as pain rockets up her arm, listening for anyone who might have heard - but no, the motel is still essentially abandoned, and Mrs. Jenkins is still as deaf as a post.

Wincing against the agony in her arm, she tucks the metal strip back into her pocket and presses against the glass, the special grips in her gloves helping her ease the window open quickly and relatively quietly. She reaches in to part the faded, paisley curtains, batting dust away from her nose. It's only a small opening, but she's worked her way through smaller - jumping up, she catches hold of the top of the frame and lowers herself so she's sitting perched on the open ledge, bending backwards until she's slipped, deftly, inside.

Her slippers make contact with cracked, yellowed tile, moldy and crumbling at the edges of the room - the bathroom, then, as she'd suspected. She blinks several times to adjust her vision to the oppressive blackness, and tugs the curtain closed again.

Her penlight sweeps over the contents of the room briskly - the absolute bare minimum of toiletries, which she sweeps into the bag at her hip, and a bottle of what looks like painkillers. The name on the label is unfamiliar to her, but they're a similar size and shape to the kind that Doc used to give out, which means they're probably stronger than horse tranquilizers. She puts that into the bag too, relieved to see the medical kit resting on the back of the toilet - hopefully that's also specially-designed for assassins, because she's running out of her own medical supplies trying to keep him patched up and buying more in the quantities she needs would only attract attention.

Moving quickly, she steps into the bedroom proper, casting her light around for Wick's personal effects. To her surprise, the room is in complete disarray, with furniture upended and holes in the walls - this must have been where Wick was attacked, then. Her light catches on various bloodstains scattered throughout the room, but mercifully there aren't any bodies - she wonders what he'd managed to do with them before dragging himself all the way to her house. Given the number of bloodstains - and is that _brain matter _on the wall? - she can see, she'd wager there were at least three Russians, maybe four.

The idea that Wick might not be entirely human once again flits through her mind. Seriously, who can just… kill this many people and take the kind of hits he's taking and keep going like it's nothing?

Grimacing, she steps around a particularly large stain and maneuvers farther into the room, eager to get out of here as quickly as possible.

It appears the Bowery King had set him up relatively well - there are a couple of nice, but otherwise nondescript, business suits hanging side-by-side in the closet like a pair of corpses, and she recognizes the duffel in the back as the kind of thing the assassins at the Continental were always lugging weapons around in. Beyond that and a bag of dog food in the corner, there's not many other personal items in the place - the dingy, recently bloodsoaked comforter is still made up the way the maid likes it, and it makes her wonder how much he's actually slept since he's been here.

The bedside table has been overturned and the drawer is in pieces across the room - it looks like it was probably used to murder at least one person. The motel-provided Bible that must have been inside it lies open at her feet, torn to shreds, alongside some kind of gun with a spent cartridge; the make and caliber are unfamiliar to her, as guns have never been her weapon of choice, but she resolves to take it with her anyway. A quick rummage through the dresser reveals underclothes and t-shirts, mostly, and she wads those and his suits carelessly into her bag. It's full to bursting, now, but there's nothing for it - she'd walked here to better limit her chances of being noticed, and she's not hauling more than two bags all the way back across town; her speed will be severely inhibited as it is. The dog food will have to remain, and Wick's pet can keep eating table scraps until she can get back to the grocery store.

She casts a final glance back around the room, making sure she hasn't missed anything important, before snatching Wick's gun bag and stepping back into the bathroom, working over the situation in her head. He must have paid up for the month to avoid being disturbed, which buys them a little time until Mrs. Jenkins discovers the scene in the bedroom, but it's still a problem. In a town that hasn't had a single murder in its recorded history, this is going to draw a _lot_ of attention, bodies or no bodies.

Sighing, she tosses the bags back out the window before slipping through it herself, having only been in the room a grand total of six minutes. Not exactly a personal record, or even a particularly difficult task, but she's pleased with herself nonetheless. She doesn't miss being a thief, but it's hard not find satisfaction in the reminder of how good she'd been at it.

_Still got it, Blackbird old girl,_ she thinks sardonically, bending down to grab the bags so she can be on her way home. With any luck, Winnie will still be dead to the world, none the wiser that she was even gone.

Something shifts behind her, the scrape of a boot against hard-packed earth, and Madilyn reacts on instinct, launching herself back at the window. Her slipper finds purchase against the ledge and she uses the momentum to spring up and catch the edge of the roof, swinging up and over in one fluid movement. She presses herself flat against the shingles just in time for an enormous shape to emerge from around the corner, flashlight sweeping back and forth. His light falls almost instantly on the bags she'd had no choice but to abandon.

_Oh, perfect._

He bends down, rummaging through them for a moment, before straightening and moving closer to the window directly below her. Even in the darkness, she can make out the shape of the gun on his belt.

She resists the panic-impulse to scoot backwards up the roof, further out of his line of sight, trusting in one of the first lessons she'd ever learned in the Den: even clever people can see only what they want to. If he doesn't expect to see her lurking on the roof, chances are he won't, unless she does something to draw his eye.

A distant bang echoes somewhere below her. If she has to guess, she'd say the door to Wick's room has just been unceremoniously - and loudly - kicked open. There's a long beat of silence, presumably as the intruder realizes what he's walked in on, followed by particularly foul Russian curse.

"Empty," an accented voice calls faintly. "Wick was definitely here, but he's gone now."

Madilyn resists the urge to bang her head against the roof. Of _course_ Belikov already sent reinforcements when his first wave never reported back. No doubt they'd been keeping in contact with him, letting him track their whereabouts, and when they'd disappeared after arriving in Indian Springs, he'd known where to send more of his thugs. For a bounty of fifteen million, she'd be that careful too.

"Ruslan," the figure below her murmurs through the window, gesturing back towards the bags, "someone has been cleaning house."

"Wick," replies the other voice, closer now. There's a brief conversation in Russian. Madilyn understands only the very basics of the language, and she hasn't heard it at all outside of TV in five years, so she doesn't really understand what they're saying. She thinks they might be making a plan to search the area, but she's not certain until Not-Ruslan turns to disappear into the overgrown shrubbery in the lot behind the motel.

It's so dark and the overgrowth is so extensive that he's swallowed from her sight immediately, the only indicator of his whereabouts the heavy clomp of his boots through the brush and the glare of his flashlight as he searches for the elusive John Wick.

Madilyn spares a moment to marvel at his stupidity. If Wick really had been out there, chances are good that poor, dimwitted Not-Ruslan would already be dead after giving his position away so easily. If this is the caliber of thug that's been attempting to collect on Wick's bounty so far, no wonder they're all dead._ She's _half-tempted to kill the idiot on principle alone.

Ruslan himself apparently possesses a least a few more brain cells than his partner, because he remains behind in the motel room, presumably lying in wait.

Gritting her teeth, Madilyn tenses, edging ever so slowly back up the roof. When these idiots fail to find Wick, they'll call for backup - maybe even for Belikov himself - and they'll search the town. They might not go door-to-door, but they won't have to; small towns are notorious for their gossip chains, and nothing ever stays secret for long. Someone will spot Wick's dog in her yard, or will remember seeing a shady figure matching his description stumbling down her street, and then she'll be done for.

"Dammit, Wick," she snarls under her breath, reaching up to grip the beanie concealing her hair in frustration. He's not well enough to travel yet, either - loathe as she is to admit it, the man needs serious rest to finish recovering both from the injuries he'd sustained at the hands of Belikov's people, and the ones he'd gotten before he ever showed up in her life. The Bowery King wants him alive and in fighting condition, and to be honest, so does she - if he's brought this hell into her life, she wants to make certain he's fit to help her fight it off. She's caught between a rock and a hard place, unable to either stay or flee, and the knowledge ties her stomach in frantic, panicky knots.

Madilyn swallows it down. It's not time for hysteria, it's time for a _plan_.

Biting her lip, she watches Not-Ruslan stomp indelicately through the brush several yards off. Her mind whirs, fingers drumming sharply against the shingles as a potential course of action shifts shakily into place.

It's a long shot, and one of the riskiest things she's ever done, and goes against everything she's ever been taught about survival. It will not, ultimately, even solve the problem - all it will do, at most, is buy them time. But, if she's very clever, and very quick, and very, very lucky, it might just buy them _enough_.

Slowly, Madilyn eases back down the way she'd come, army-crawling down the roof as stealthily as she can. It occurs to her that this will only work as well as she needs it to if Ruslan comes outside, and even then only if Not-Ruslan can't come back to help him.

She bites her lip again, considering. Then, silently as a cat, slips off the roof. Pressing herself flat to the side of the motel wall, she scoots away from the window, keeping a careful eye on Not-Ruslan's distant progress. She tugs at the collar of her dark turtleneck to better ensure her tattoos are covered - her old suit would have been better for concealment, but she hadn't been about to dig it out from where she'd buried it just for what she had originally assumed would be a simple B&E in a place with no security.

Sucking in a sharp, quiet breath, she darts into the shrubbery, stopping only once to pull a stiletto blade out of her other pocket. Apparently fed up with not finding Wick, or perhaps realizing how much of a sitting duck he is, Not-Ruslan has started winding his way back towards the motel, which is the exact opposite of what she needs him to do. She shifts back farther away from the building, and then makes a sound like a stifled sneeze.

Not-Ruslan's footsteps stop abruptly, no doubt listening for confirmation. Rolling her eyes, Madilyn flails wildly as she shifts farther and farther away from the building, disturbing as much of the brush as possible and sending a few roosting birds squawking indignantly into the air.

_If I get so much as a _single_ tick,_ she thinks irritably as he begins beating a hasty path in her direction. She crouches down, falling completely still, listening as he draws nearer and nearer to her hiding place. His flashlight sweeps the brush, nearly blinding her.

"I know you are here, Wick," Not-Ruslan growls. "They call you _Baba Yaga_. I think you are not so clever as they say."

Madilyn's in agreement with him, but regrettably is in no position to tell him so.

"You will make me a very wealthy man," he continues when his words are met with no response. "And famous, too."

Madilyn crouches lower as he brushes the weeds by her face, tickling her nose. _Come hither, hither, pretty fly…_

"I expected more from the infamous John Wick," says Not-Ruslan, apparently frustrated now as he bats, aimlessly, at the growth that comes to his chest and shoulders. "You will hide like a coward?"

Madilyn grips the blade tighter in her hand, breathing steadily the way she was taught. It is nothing to set her shoulders just so, to tense her muscles in the right places, to wait for exactly the right moment to pounce. All is stillness.

"You will say _nothing?_" Not-Ruslan snarls, nearly bellowing. His light shifts away from her, facing the other direction until she's completely in his blindspot.

Madilyn rolls her eyes again. "Nevermore," she drawls, and springs.

Not-Ruslan reacts on a dime, swinging around and bringing his gun up in the same movement, but he's still too slow. Her body collides with his arm, knocking the weapon wide, and her blade finds his throat in a single blow. Gurgling, he drops the light and sinks to his knees, bathing the world in darkness and coppery, slippery blood. It's an easy thing to wrestle the gun away and slip clear of his hold, after that - he's more interested in gripping his throat, trying to stop his lifeblood from gushing out of him.

Instinctive, maybe, but still futile. She doesn't stay to watch, lingering only long enough to tuck the gun into her waistband and snatch up his cell phone, before turning her back on his gasping form and making her way back towards the motel. He'll be dead before she even makes it there.

She can see Ruslan's flashlight glinting through the window of Wick's old room, can see the bags still lying on the ground where she'd left them. He has to come outside for this to work, since she's not interested in engaging him in an enclosed space, not to mention that if she succeeds in killing him too it will be much easier to dispose of his body if he's out here in the open. Thinking quickly, she shifts through the underbrush and comes around to the side of the building out of sight of the window, hugging the wall until she's right beside it. She crouches down, drags the bags towards her and tucks Not-Ruslan's gun into one. Then she takes several steps back and pitches them both up onto the roof.

They thud satisfactorily, enough to get Ruslan's attention inside. "Markov," she hears him hiss as he approaches the window. "Is that you?"

When he peers through the glass, she's standing plainly before him, her back up against the underbrush, the stiletto blade held loosely in one hand. The blood dripping noticeably from it looks almost black in the poor light.

She waves the weapon at him jauntily, letting him see the flash of her teeth.

Ruslan curses, jerking sharply in the shadows of the bathroom. She ducks and rolls back towards the building just in time for a pair of hollow _pop-pops_ to ring through the silence.

Being _shot at_ is never something to be grateful for, in Madilyn's experience, but she appreciates that he'd had the foresight to at least use a suppressor. It appears staying relatively under the radar is important to him, too.

Inside, Ruslan spits another profanity once he realizes she's out of his range, and there's the sound of heavy footfalls as he sprints for the door. Madilyn grins, and lurches for the roof again. It's only seconds before he comes barrelling around the corner, gun drawn, body hunched for confrontation, but she's already disappeared from his sight.

He's taller than his counterpart, and broader, and if she had to guess, probably smarter. He spins in a slow circle, scanning the area for her, teeth gritted in a snarl. Madilyn waits until his back is turned to rise into a low crouch, prepared to spring upon him the way she had his friend. The moonlight at her back casts thin, eerie shadows on the ground, the image of her form splashed over his like a bird of prey prepared to strike.

Oh wait, _shit _-

Ruslan notices the shadow at the same time she does. He's firing almost before he fully turns around, but she's already thrown herself off the roof, tucking into a roll and gritting her teeth as her shoulder takes the brunt of the fall. She uses the momentum to spring back to her feet again, leaping back into the brush for cover as his bullets strafe the ground in a lethal wake behind her.

She flings herself flat as bullets whizz overhead, crawling back and back and back through the shrubbery. It's long, breathless moments before his magazine mercifully clicks empty, and she hears him curse again, presumably fumbling for a reload as he steps into the overgrowth to search for her. She holds very, very still.

"Who are you, little bird?" sneers Ruslan, batting at the weeds around himself. "You will not survive to collect on Wick's bounty, I'm afraid."

He might be right, at least about the survival part - Madilyn's only combat strengths lie in blitz attacks and dirty fighting - if he's expecting her to jump out at him she's already lost essentially the only advantage she had to begin with. She holds her breath, wracking her brain for a solution.

Up ahead of her, a few feet away, something pale slithers through the grass. A rattlesnake, probably disturbed by the noise and the stomping around - too late it occurs to her that this entire area is probably infested with them. Forget ticks, if she gets bitten by a _snake_ she really will kill Wick.

_Although…_ Keeping a careful eye on Ruslan's progress through the brush, she feels around until she finds a pebble, bringing it up and aiming carefully. It hits the ground directly in front of the snake, bouncing off its snout. Predictably, it hisses, rearing up and rattling its tail.

In the near dead-silence behind the building, the suddenness of it goes off like a gunshot. Ruslan lets off two quick shots in the direction of the noise, and Madilyn rolls behind him, blade flashing, slicing deep into the backs of his knees.

He goes down snarling, catching the side of her face with the butt of his gun. The impact knocks her flat, ears ringing, head spinning. He fumbles, trying to stand, but Madilyn had known what she was doing when she'd cut him there - she'd severed multiple ligaments in that strike. He howls in agony when he fails to get to his feet and falls back to his knees instead, only barely managing to catch himself with one arm.

She can't imagine the kind of pain he's in. She hopes it's excruciating.

He snarls, trying to bring his gun up with the hand that isn't supporting his weight, but she flips to her back and kicks at him once, twice, knocking the weapon out of his hand with the first blow and shattering his nose with the second. His head snaps back and he drops like a sack of potatoes, groaning and cursing and spitting blood.

She tries to scramble to her feet, but his meaty hand flashes out at the last second, hooking around her ankle and hauling her towards him so fast her back scrapes harshly against the ground. In an instant he's on her, his weight pinning her to the earth as his fist comes down _one-two-three_ into her face.

Her eye swells shut almost on impact, her mouth fills with blood. All she knows is rage and pain and desperation as she tries to bring an arm up to protect her face, tries to shove him off, to claw at his eyes. It's familiar to her like an old friend, like the lines of poetry she knows by heart.

The cold detachment she feels as she plunges her stiletto blade into his belly is familiar too, and so is the rush of breath that leaves him, foul and bitter, as it hits her directly in the face. At first he looks almost more shocked than pained, but that doesn't last very long - she pulls the knife out and sinks it in again, higher, before jerking down and twisting, slicing through organs like butter. Her fingers are slick with blood, her body is bathed in it, and she gags on the smell, but she doesn't remove the blade, only shoves it in deeper, buries it to the handle.

More blood explodes from his lips, dribbling on her face and throat. She thinks she screams, but it's not from fear.

It takes an eternity and no time at all for his body to go limp, crushing her against the ground and driving the breath from her chest. For what feels like several minutes, the world goes white and blank and empty.

And then she blinks and above her, the stars spin riotously. The world fades in and out like a heartbeat, light-dark, light-dark. It feels like hours before she's able to find the energy to move, to shove the corpse off of her, to crawl to her feet.

She stands there for a moment longer, breathing heavily, doubled over in an attempt to keep from stumbling back down. She spits blood - hers or his, there's no way to tell.

_Well, that sucked,_ she thinks, reaching up to delicately touch the puffy skin around her right eye, already so swollen she can't see out of it.

Everything hurts. Madilyn bends down anyway, snagging the gun from the ground and Ruslan's phone from his pocket the same way she had with his friend. He's got a few coins, too, which she also confiscates, before turning once more back towards the motel.

The night isn't over yet.

* * *

Idleness, John has come to realize, does not suit him.

He frowns, reconsidering - it does suit _him_, John Wick, the man who had loved his wife. It does not suit the Thing beneath his skin, the Baba Yaga, the killer of hundreds, the avenger of puppies. His entire body feels like it's hardwired for violence, for action, the same way it had felt before he'd met Helen and buried that version of himself in the basement of their house.

He wishes he'd gone with Moone. Not out of any particular desire for her company, of course - she's about as personable as a cactus and equally likely to scratch - but out of a desire to _do_ something, anything, to get this humming strain for activity out from under his skin. It's _his_ things she's gone to collect, after all.

But ever since her phone call with the Bowery King three days ago, she's been adamant that he does no more work or activity than necessary, presumably so he can heal faster. He's nowhere near stupid enough to believe she cares at all about his well-being - her sudden attentiveness to his physical state has everything to do with whatever mysterious deal she's arranged.

_He wants what I stole from Kincaid,_ she'd said, and she hadn't meant the kid. Once again, he wonders precisely what scheme the Bowery King is concocting, what web he's weaving deep below the streets of New York to wreak his vengeance. Moone's involvement hasn't become any clearer than it had the first time he'd seen her in the grocery store, and if she knows what the Bowery King's endgame is, she's not saying anything.

John grimaces against the pain that general movement tends to cause him now as he shifts to look at the clock on the wall. Moone's been gone for about an hour and a half, just brushing up against too long. The errand shouldn't be taking this much time - it's a fairly long walk to the motel from here, but not overly so, and there's not much in his room to collect.

_Maybe she ran into trouble,_ a voice whispers in the back of his mind, _the kind that follows you wherever you go._

He tilts his head back against the sofa, stroking a hand down the dog's back, and wonders if he ought to go after her. If he does and nothing turns out to be wrong, she wouldn't appreciate his interference. If she did happen to be in trouble, she'd appreciate it even less.

Even so, she'd only be in trouble because of him, and despite the fact that her bedside manner - and her _general_ manner - leaves a lot to be desired, she'd still helped him. _Is_ still helping him, despite everything.

He starts to shift to his feet when a tiny noise from the hallway snags his attention. He jerks around to see the kid standing there, thumb in her mouth, watching him with tear-filled blue eyes.

_Right_. That would be the other reason he's not sure he should go out in search of Moone. He doesn't know a whole lot about kids, but he's relatively certain _five_ is too young to be left alone for any extended length of time.

"Where's mommy?" she says, a warning hitch in her voice that sets him on edge. Winifred doesn't seem to be particularly tantrum-prone, and he has yet to see her cry about anything in the three days he's been around her, but the idea that she might start crying now isn't a pleasant one.

He can kill in hundreds of brutal ways, speak a dozen languages and understand a dozen more, and strip, clean, and reassemble almost any kind of firearm totally blind. Children, however, are another matter entirely.

He's an assassin, not a babysitter.

"She went out," he says, at a loss for how to explain more than that.

Winifred sniffles, wiping at her eyes with her free hand. Her stuffed lamb is tucked under her arm, clutched to her like a lifeline. She looks impossibly small, framed in the yawning darkness of the hall behind her. He wonders how Moone does it, lives with the knowledge she has to protect something this tiny and defenseless.

It makes him think of Daisy, which always makes the edges of his vision go fuzzy and white.

"Do you need something?" he asks, a touch desperately. As if sensing her distress, the dog hops down from the couch and trots over to her, licking at the wetness on her cheeks.

"I had a bad dream," she says, her face crumpling at the reminder. "I want my mommy."

"She'll be back soon," he says. "You should... try to sleep."

Her lip trembles around her thumb. She sniffles again, reaching out to pet the dog's muzzle as he continues to lick her face. "Can I please have some milk?"

He casts a glance at the door, silently willing Moone to walk through it. When no such aid is immediately forthcoming, he sighs and gestures to the kitchen. "Come on."

Her eyes brighten, but she doesn't take her thumb from her mouth, shuffling quietly along behind him as he steps into the kitchen and flicks on the light. He knows where her princess cups are, at least, having seen her drink out of nothing else for the entire time he's been here, and he snags one from an upper cabinet at random, plastic and purple with a print of a girl in a green dress kissing a frog.

"That's Princess Tiana," Winifred says around her thumb, climbing into a chair. "She's not as cool as Rapunzel, but I still like her."

He _hmms_ as he opens the fridge, pulling out the carton of milk. He's not sure how much she typically drinks, but decides against giving her more than half a cup to keep her from getting up again tonight.

He sets it in front of her and puts the milk back in the fridge. When he turns back to look at her, she's staring at him dubiously.

It's an awfully condescending expression for someone who doesn't know how to tie her own shoes. "What?"

"You're 'posed to heat it up," she says, gesturing to the microwave.

Well naturally. "Right," he murmurs with a sigh, taking the cup back again. Fifteen seconds should do it, right? He can't remember the last time he made warm milk. Actually, has he ever?

"I like your tattoos," Winifred says quietly. Her chin rests on the back of her chair, and she blinks at him slowly. "Mommy said not to ask about them. But I'm allowed to tell you they're cool."

She could hardly fail to notice them since he's been shirtless for three days now, but it still feels strange to have a little kid like her staring at the symbols of his violent lifestyle. Stranger still for her to think they're _cool_.

"Thanks," he says.

"Mommy's are prettier, though."

The timer beeps. He pulls the cup out and hands it back to Winifred again. She tests it with her pinky, and, apparently deciding it meets her exacting standards, proceeds to sip at her milk with the speed of a drugged tortoise.

"Do you get nightmares?" she asks. Her legs are too short to reach the ground, so she swings her feet _thump-thump_ against the bottom rung of her chair.

He's not sure how to answer the question. His dreams have been violent and bloody and full of horror for as long as he can remember. Do you call them nightmares, when you have no basis for comparison? The best nights are always when he doesn't dream at all, and that had only ever happened when he was with Helen.

"Yeah," he finally says.

She frowns. "Mommy does too. That's why I can't sleep with her."

He'd wondered about that. Moone had made Winifred sleep in her room since his arrival, and he'd caught a glimpse of it on his way to the bathroom a few days ago, had seen how she'd given her daughter the queen-size bed and had made a pallet of blankets on the floor for herself.

It's a precaution he understands. Once, shortly after he and Helen had been married, he'd woken in the dark certain someone was trying to kill him. That someone had been his wife, who had placed a hand on his shoulder in an attempt to wake him and received a solid blow to the jaw for her efforts.

He'd never loathed himself more. Helen, ever stalwart and under no illusions about who he was or what he had done, had done her best to assure him it didn't matter, that she didn't blame him, that she knew he hadn't done it on purpose.

The bruise had swelled to a goose-egg by dawn, a sickly riot of black and blue - she was lucky he hadn't fractured her jaw. He'd slept on the couch for weeks afterwards.

Beside him, the dog chuffs, before trotting over to rest his head on Winifred's lap. She giggles, patting his head gently. "I dreamed about the Bandersnatch," she admits on a whisper, like the very mention of its name might make it appear.

That one takes him a minute. "Like from the poem?" he says, tired.

Winifred nods, sipping at her milk again. Her feet swing _thump-thump-thump._ "It's scary. I keep dreaming that it wants to eat me."

"What about the Jabberwocky?" he says, moving around to sink into a chair across from her, resigned to his new position as babysitter.

She gives him a _duh_ look for the second time in five minutes. For obvious reasons, she bears almost no physical resemblance to Moone, but when she makes that face it's hard for him to remember they aren't related. "The Jabberwocky _dies_," she says, "'cause of the Vorpal sword." She lowers her voice to a whisper again, eyes comically large as she clutches her stuffed lamb closer. "The Bandersnatch is still _out_ there."

He glances at the clock again. "They don't live in Nevada," he says absently.

Winifred frowns. "They don't?"

John blinks at her. He'd been joking, but then, she's only five. If she believes in the Bandersnatch, of course she'll believe him when he makes up facts about it. Still, if it'll get her back to bed…

"They don't," he confirms. "They like it cold."

"Oh," Winifred says, looking down at her cup. "What about the Jub-Jub bird?"

"Extinct," John says.

Before she can inevitably ask another question, the sound of the deadbolts on the front door unlocking one-by-one gets her attention.

"Mommy's home!" she says, bounding off of her chair and towards the door with the ceaseless energy all children seem to possess, despite the fact that it's almost two in the morning. The dog trails after her, tail wagging.

Moone slips inside moments later, blinking in the harsh light pouring in from the kitchen. It takes him a moment to make sense of what he's seeing.

She's a mess. Her right eye is purple and swollen to the size of a golf ball, her nose and mouth drip blood, and the rest of her appears to be soaked in it. He can smell it clear across the room.

Winifred screeches to a halt in front of her, staring at her mother with wide eyes. "Mommy…?" she says hesitantly, tilting her head in a way that looks more wary than confused.

For a long, sluggish second, Moone looks down at her without saying anything, or even appearing to really see her. Her breathing is labored and her entire body slouches, hunches, shoulders up around her ears, fists clenched by her sides, teeth gritted so tightly it looks painful. The dog sniffs at her, whining.

"Moone," John hears himself say, when the silence becomes unbearable. Clearly she'd run into some kind of trouble, but it doesn't appear to be anything urgent or she'd hopefully still be moving, not standing there blinking dully at the pair of them like she's not sure what they're doing here, who they are.

Slowly, Winifred approaches her, hands outstretched, and tugs on the hem of her shirt. "Mommy," she says, "come back."

That, of all things, appears to snap her out of whatever trance she'd fallen into. Jerking sharply as though startling awake, she shrugs the bags off of her shoulder and tosses them at his feet with perhaps a touch more force than the motion requires, before crouching down to Winifred's level.

"What are you doing up, Lamb?" she asks, managing to sound almost normal. Her voice only trembles a little.

Unease forgotten, Winifred sticks her thumb back in her mouth again. "I had a nightmare. Mr. John made me some milk."

"Did he?" Moone says, casting him a dismissive glance before reaching out to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. "You need to get back to bed, sweetie. It's super late."

Winifred nods, stretching out her free arm in the universal gesture for _carry me_. Despite the pain she's clearly in, Moone reaches out to do just that before she freezes, pulls back.

"Did you finish your milk?"

Winifred shakes her head.

"Okay then, go do that."

Winifred nods eagerly and turns to obey. Moone catches his eye for only a moment as she straightens, then makes her unsteady way down the hallway towards the bathroom. When she comes back, she's tying a bathrobe around her clothes, effectively hiding the bloodstains from view.

"All done?"

Winifred nods, taking her cup to the sink before reaching up to be carried again. Moone bends down, face contorting in pain, and hoists her up into her arms. She only sways a little before regaining her equilibrium and sweeping past him down the hall.

"Thank you for the milk, Mr. John," Winifred calls over her mother's shoulder as they disappear into Moone's bedroom. Playmate gone, the dog chuffs once and hops back up onto the couch, curling up and watching him lazily.

John uses the silence to bend down and rifle through the bags. His suspicions that Moone had run into trouble are immediately confirmed as soon as he sees the two guns at the top of the first bag that don't belong to him. He frowns, checking the magazines before setting them aside. His clothes, toiletries, and first aid kit are all here - she'd been thorough, not that he'd expected any less. He's already well aware of her attention to detail.

When Moone comes back into the room several minutes later, the bathrobe and ruined clothes are gone, replaced with a thin purple tank top and the baggy sweatpants she's so fond of, and her skin is damp and rubbed red, the blood hastily scrubbed away.

"They tracked you to your motel," she says without preamble. "Showed up right as I was leaving."

"How many?"

"Only two." She tosses something at him without warning - a cell phone so outdated it can only be a burner smacks into his hand. "Pulled that off one of them."

"They were Belikov's?" he confirms grimly, and she nods.

"You speak Russian, right?"

It's his turn to nod - she has no way of knowing it's his first language. She walks to the door and steps into a pair of flats lying on the entry rug. "I need you to text Belikov from that phone telling him that John Wick _was _here, but that you've got a lead he fled to Pahrump Valley, and that you plan to follow him and you'll check back in when you have something."

John frowns. "He'll track the phones."

"Yes, I realize that, thank you," Moone snaps. "Will you just tell him?"

John looks down at the phone again, scrolling through the contacts. Wife, mistress, gambling buddy… and a number with no saved contact name that can only be Belikov, if the string of outgoing texts ending in "boss" are any indication. He sends the message, then looks up at Moone. She's leaning up against the door, arms folded, head back, good eye hooded. She looks wrung-out, practically shaking in an effort to keep herself upright.

He looks at the other phone in her hand, presumably another one she'd stolen. She shifts at his glance, turning it over in her hands. "Is it weird that there were only two? I don't pretend to know how hired thugs operate. I was always a free agent."

He's not sure what it means. Maybe they were just scouts. Maybe Belikov isn't certain he wants to start throwing bodies at the problem _en masse_ yet.

"You killed them?" he asks instead of answering, even though he already knows the answer. If she hadn't, this would be a different, and much more frantic, conversation.

She nods, raising a hand to rub at her temple. The calligraphy on her forearm shifts in the dim light. He's been trying to make it out for days but she won't sit still long enough in his presence. "I had to."

It couldn't have been easy - her current physical state is a testament to that, to say nothing of the blood she'd been covered in. For someone who made her living on stealing rather than murder, he's almost impressed. He wonders, almost idly, what she'd done with the bodies.

It's not relevant. Her plan, however, is. "Pahrump Valley?"

Her expression relaxes into something faintly wry. "That's where the garbage goes."

It takes him a moment to process this. "You're gonna throw the phones away."

Moone eyes him with a lazy tilt of her head. "You said it yourself, Belikov will be tracking them. The garbage runs tomorrow, and it'll take them to the landfill in Pahrump Valley, making it look like his thugs are on the move. By the time he realizes they aren't actually there, you should be well enough for us to…" she trails off briefly, swallows. "Leave."

It's a solid plan, especially given that she'd come up with it essentially on the fly. He'd rather just hunt Belikov down and cut the chase off entirely, of course, but since that's not a viable option this one will suffice.

The phone in his hand chimes, startling them both. An acknowledgement from Belikov, coupled with an order to hurry. When he looks back up, Moone is holding her hand out expectantly.

"He give the okay?" she asks as he tosses it to her.

He nods, and without another word she slips out the front door. Bemused, he crosses to the front window and watches her steal across the street to a house on the far end whose garbage cans are set out for the trash run later this morning. She slips both phones inside and heads back towards the house, moving swiftly - if also a little unsteadily - as a shadow.

_Paranoid thing, aren't you,_ he thinks, but then, it's not like he can't relate.

She doesn't say a word as she comes back inside, only locks the deadbolts behind her and crosses to the kitchen. She's still swaying when she walks.

"You probably have a concussion," he says, watching as she rinses out Winifred's cup before slipping it into the dishwasher.

"That's a possibility when you get hit a bunch of times in the head," she snaps, but there's little fire behind it. She just sounds exhausted.

He's not sure what to say. It's obvious she wants to be in this situation as much has he wants to put her in it, but there's no alternative. He'd made his choices, just as she'd made the choice to indebt herself to the Bowery King.

Still.

He crosses to the freezer and pulls out an ice pack he'd seen earlier, before extending it silently in her direction. She gives him a scornful look, and for a long moment he half-expects her to smack it out of his hand.

Eventually, however, she takes it, hissing when she presses it to the ugly, swollen skin around her right eye. She probably has a skull fracture, and this close he can see that her other pupil is blown wider than it should be - definitely a concussion, then.

"Switch to a warm compress after a couple of days," he says, without quite knowing why. "The swelling will go down faster."

"I know how to treat a black eye," she says, brushing past him to reach into an upper cabinet for a bottle of what looks like painkillers. She downs four dry before slipping across the room to collapse into a seat at the kitchen table, her head in her hands.

"You should shower," she says. "You're starting to reek."

She's not wrong. He crosses the room to take a seat across from her instead. They'd made their choices, maybe, but the fact remains that she wouldn't be in this situation if it wasn't for him.

And anyway, he's not certain she isn't going to pass out.

She doesn't look up when he sits down, but she goes tense again, as though prepared to flee.

"You're one of Castillion's graduates," he says, mostly for lack of any better subject matter. He's not exactly what someone would consider a sparkling conversationalist.

That gets her attention. She jerks sharply up to look at him, one dark eye locked on his own. He gestures to the old, faded brands on the backs of her hands - snarling fox heads burned deeply into the skin.

"The Den of Thieves," he presses. "I heard most of you don't survive the program."

He doesn't know much about it, truthfully - only that it operates under the Table and that the guy who runs it, Erik Castillion, is rumored to be mean as a snake - but he wonders, given what he's seen of her so far, if it hadn't been a little like living with the Director, if things in the Den hadn't been natural selection, hadn't been _adapt or die_.

She recoils from his words, carding a hand through her lank hair. It's braided, but tangled and frizzed from where she'd had it tucked under her beanie. This close, he can finally make out the calligraphy on her right arm, pale and pencil-thin: _bloody, but unbowed._

_Invictus, _he thinks. Helen had liked that one, said it suited him. He thinks it suits her, too.

"I heard you once killed three guys in a bar with a pencil," Moone finally says, drawing him back to the conversation. "I'm calling BS, personally."

He watches her without saying anything. For whatever reason, this makes her grin at him, baring bloody teeth. The scars across her mouth crinkle and shift oddly with the motion.

"You're scary, you know that?" she says, gesturing vaguely to his face and chest. There's a worrying slur to her words. "With your… tattoos, and your broodiness, and your caveman grunting. I can't make you out. It's weird."

"The kid doesn't think I'm scary," he says. He wonders why he's still talking, why she hasn't just left for her bed yet, why they're still continuing this sham of a conversation.

He wonders why he'd instigated it in the first place.

Moone's face falls, her entire body deflating so suddenly he half-expects her to tumble out of her chair. Her good eye burns with something old and dark and familiar. "Winnie doesn't know enough to be scared of things like us," she says. "She still thinks the only monsters in the world are the kind that hide under her bed."

_And whose fault is that_, he wants to say, that old disgust flaring before he can quell it. It's raising its head more and more lately, this dissatisfaction with what Moone had done. Winifred is loved and cared for here, he can't dispute that. But the fact of the matter is that Moone had abducted her, and left her real parents to believe she was dead, all while sheltering Winifred from the cruel reality of what she was.

According to Aurelio, Kincaid's ever-stoic wife, Katrina, had screamed and cried for so long once she'd gotten the news that her daughter had drowned they'd had to sedate her. Monsters can weep too, after all.

It might be the name of the game, but some things, even after all these years as the Baba Yaga, still leave a bad taste in his mouth.

The Kincaids are not good people. But neither is John, and he remembers all too well the depth of the pain and rage he'd felt when he'd buried little Daisy's body, remembers how he'd begged Helen's forgiveness with every turn of the shovel for being unable to protect the last of the light she'd given him. Remembers how he'd wanted, just for a moment, to follow that dog into her grave.

He doesn't have to wonder if Katrina felt the same.

They lapse into silence, broken only by Moone's sharp inhales of pain when she shifts the compress on her injured eye. Her left arm, he notices now, also has calligraphy: _still, like dust, I'll rise._ The day she'd called the Bowery King, he remembers seeing the word _nevermore _trailing down her spine, surrounded by spiraling black feathers that matched the ones on her throat.

The reasoning behind Moone's apparent love of poetry remains a mystery to him. She's not educated, and it seems too flowery for her, when everything else he's seen of her points to someone ruthlessly practical. He can hear her reading poetry to the kid every night, knows she recites it under her breath when she's preoccupied or stressed.

"She thinks I took a really bad fall," Moone says, a touch sheepishly as though she knows how thin the lie is. "I'd like to keep it that way, please."

"I understand," John says, unsurprised. He wonders how long Moone believes she can shelter her, how much Winifred will start to piece together eventually.

He wonders, quite suddenly, what the kid believes about her own father.

"Thanks, by the way," Moone continues, mostly grudgingly, "for helping her get the milk."

He only nods. She's a good kid, despite the questions.

It's quiet for a moment longer before Moone speaks again. Her tone is somber, dull, almost defeated. "If they do come for you," she says, then corrects herself, because she's many things but she isn't stupid, "_when_ they come, will you help me keep her safe? Will you do me that favor, at least?"

_You don't want me to promise that,_ he almost says, because everything he touches inevitably turns to blood. He couldn't protect a damn puppy, how could he promise to protect a child who never should have been involved in any of this?

But he looks at the ruin of Moone's face, and at what she'd endured to bring him back his things, and he thinks about how Winifred had said _I like your tattoos_, like it was perfectly normal for a half-dead, half-dressed man to wander around her house.

In the end, there's only one answer he can give.

"I'll try," he says, hoping she understands him, hoping she hears the emphasis on the words.

But it's Moone, ruthlessly practical, so of course she does. She leans back, nodding sharply as though they'd struck a business deal rather than a bargain for her daughter's life, and then pushes away from the table and gets to her feet.

But concussions can be deceptive, and she stumbles almost instantly, reeling like a sailor in a storm. He stands, reaching on instinct to catch her. Both of them grunt in pain when the force of her staggering against him knocks them back against the table, straining injuries new and old.

For a moment he feels her freeze in his hold, her entire body tensing like a taut wire. Her hand braces against his chest, her forehead bends almost to his shoulder, her breath fans against his skin.

It takes him a moment to realize that she's trembling like a kitten.

The weird tension shatters when she lets out a sudden, soft laugh that vibrates through his frame. He's surprised to realize it's genuine. "Look at us," she says, "the Boogeyman and the Blackbird, Scourges of the Underworld. We're pathetic."

She shoves none-too-gently away from him, traipsing back down the hall with one hand still pressing the compress to her eye. "Goodnight, Wick," she calls dryly over her shoulder. "Let's never do this again."

He hears her bedroom door click shut moments later, and he reaches over to flick off the kitchen light, bathing the room in darkness.

He does not sleep.

* * *

**A/N: After three months, a slight health issue, two vacations, and a mild depressive episode, I have returned victorious! I don't expect future updates to take this long, sorry you guys. I hope you enjoyed - especially the length of the chapter! Please let me know what you think!**

**Special thanks to everyone who reviewed, fav'd, and followed! You guys motivate me like nobody's business! **

**Sincerely, **

**Starcrier.**


	6. Chapter VI

_fearful symmetry_

Chapter VI

Madilyn dreams of doors that don't open and walls that close in. She dreams of the click of expensive shoes on creaking hardwood, pacing in the shadows, and of blood in her mouth and on her hands. She dreams of blue eyes in a desperate face, of a resounding gunshot that rings in her ears, of a promise whispered into baby-soft hair.

Something heavy and soft hits her in the face, and she dreams no more.

"Winnie," she rasps, burning, aching. She leaves the pillow her daughter had thrown resting half-over her head, in too much pain to move it. If she's lucky, maybe she'll suffocate. "It's too early."

"The clock says eight-thirty," Winnie says, reminding Madilyn what a mistake it was to teach her how to tell time. The room is filled with a rhythmic creaking sound, which means she's probably bouncing up and down on the bed; Madilyn makes a mental note to remind her not to do that sometime when it feels less like her skull is about to split open.

"Guess you want breakfast, huh?" she groans, opening her eyes - well, _eye_; the one is still swollen shut. With some effort, she manages to get herself upright, even as every muscle in her body protests. The effort makes the room spin.

"Ugh, Mommy, your face looks so _bad_," Winnie says as tactfully as ever, wrinkling her nose.

"It feels so bad," Madilyn says, making her uneasy way to her feet. The world rocks, flashes white, but pain is as familiar to her as her own name, and so is ignoring it in favor of more important things like making sure her daughter eats. She remains upright through sheer stubbornness alone.

Changing out of her sweatpants is honestly too much to even contemplate right now, so she doesn't bother, only ushers her daughter out of the room and into the kitchen. Winnie is as rambunctious as always, jabbering a mile a minute about a variety of topics that shift into each other with little relevance or none at all, a kaleidoscope of conversation. Madilyn makes appropriately interested noises at the necessary intervals. The books all say it's important to make your children feel like they're heard, no matter what they're talking about.

_Bowl, cereal, milk, spoon, table, _Madilyn thinks, repeating the process like a mantra as she follows the steps and guides Winnie into a chair. Her head pounds so badly it's difficult to think, which is probably why she forgets all about the assassin living on her couch until she stumbles directly into him as he enters the kitchen.

"Sorry," Wick murmurs. If he actually is, she has no way to tell behind his customary blank expression.

"You showered," she replies. The lack of dried blood and stale body odor is a dead giveaway, as is the fact that his hair is no longer shining with days of grease buildup. He'd changed into the clothes she'd brought too, looking more put together than she's seen him since he'd arrived. It's annoying, given her own disastrous state.

He only grunts in reply as he brushes past her towards the back door, nodding at Winnie when she greets him with a cheerful, "Good morning!" Madilyn scowls at his back and sinks into a chair at the table herself, resting her head on her folded arms. Their conversation last night is blurry, but she remembers sitting down in this very chair and… talking to him, like he was a normal person, or she was, or like they weren't technically enemies. He'd even _instigated_ the whole thing, topping off the night's series of increasingly bizarre events. And then she'd stumbled into him like an _idiot_ and he'd caught her, and they'd stood there leaning against one another for way too long.

It had been a bad night, all in all, mostly because she'd had to kill some people and got her ass thoroughly kicked while she was doing it, but talking with him had been… weirdly not awful. She blames the concussion.

Wick opens the back door, jarring her from her thoughts, and his dog trots in, shaking himself and making a beeline for the table where he gives new and improved meaning to the term _puppy dog eyes_ as he stares intently at Winnie's breakfast.

_Oh, right._ She supposes she can't very well let the stupid thing starve. It's not his fault he's got the terrible misfortune of being John Wick's only ally in the world.

"Does he need a specific kind of dog food?" Madilyn asks, not lifting her head from her arms. Wick looks at her for a moment, then shakes his head. She closes her eyes and tries to shift into a more comfortable position without putting pressure on her eye. Or jaw. Or face. She's not really successful, and even the minor shifts make her head pound to the point of nausea, so she abandons the effort.

"Well, he can have some cereal or whatever you've been feeding him until I can get that taken care of. Winnie, sweetie," she says, "would you be an angel and go grab Mommy's phone? It's on my nightstand."

"Okay!" There's a creak and a series of thumps as she jumps off of her chair and down the hall.

It's quiet for a long, blessed moment as her nausea swells and ebbs in time with the drilling in her head. A sudden rattling noise inches from her face breaks the silence; Madilyn cracks her good eye to see Wick extending a small orange bottle with a white cap in her direction. This, like the ice pack from last night, is no doubt his attempt at an olive branch. Just like last night, she's tempted to sneer at it, but her face hurts too much to even manage a grimace, so she takes it from him, squinting at the label. The name would be unpronounceable even if she hadn't been concussed, but she still recognizes this as one of the bottles she'd taken from his motel room, the kind that holds the specialty pain medication only found under the Table.

"I don't need your assassin pills," Madilyn grumbles.

"Take two," Wick replies, setting a glass of water down next to her.

She flips him off but does as he says, only because her vision is going slightly spotty from the pain vibrating through her entire body and she wants to sound at least vaguely coherent when she makes this phone call.

"Here you go, Mommy," Winnie says as she races back into the room, holding Madilyn's cracked, outdated smartphone in one hand and her stuffed lamb in the other. She hands her the phone and then props her lamb up against Madilyn's arm, adjusting it carefully. "You can hold Baa Baa for a while. She'll make you feel better."

"Thank you, baby," Madilyn says, swiping her thumb across the screen to unlock it. "I feel better already." Across from her, Wick takes a seat at the table a touch too heavily to be considered casual, expression twisting for a shooting-star instant.

_So he _is_ still in pain. _She tries very hard not to feel gratified and fails immediately, directing a pointed glance at the pill bottle that he ignores.

"Winnie," she says, "we're gonna play pretend for a second, okay?"

Predictably, her face lights up. "Okay! What kind?"

"When I point at you," Madilyn says, gesturing for effect, "I want you to pretend you're super sick and cough and sniffle as loud as you can, okay? Like when you had the flu." It had been a terrible affair involving way too many different kinds of bodily fluids and a thick, heavy panic that had settled in Madilyn's gut for the entire week Winnie ran the fever. Not an experience either one of them remembers with any fondness.

Winnie nods seriously, climbing back into her seat. "I'm on it."

Madilyn has no idea which of her cartoons had given her that line, but hearing it out of Winnie's mouth is almost enough to make her laugh. She scrolls to the appropriate contact and presses the phone to her ear, adjusting her head on her arm with a wince.

"Hello?" the voice on the other end picks up after the second ring, and Madilyn sighs in relief.

"Adam, hi," she says. "It's Annabel." She watches Wick's eyebrow quirk at that one, wonders if he's made the connection as to where the alias had come from.

"Yeah, I do have caller ID," her neighbor replies, the smile warm in his voice. "What's up?"

"Listen, I need a huge favor. Winnie is super sick with the flu _again_," she gestures to her daughter, who promptly begins coughing her lungs out so dramatically she almost falls out of her chair, "and I am down to, like, a single packet of ramen and some milk that expired two days ago. Do you think you could run to the store for me if I left a list and some money under the front mat? I can't leave Winnie alone and obviously I can't call Natalie over without a hazmat suit."

"Oh, poor kid," says Adam. "Yeah, I can probably go this afternoon."

"You're my hero," Madilyn says. She glances at Wick. "The whole house is a war zone right now."

"I bet," says Adam. He's quiet for a second, then: "Oh, heads up, I thought I saw a big grey dog in your backyard this morning. Want me to call Animal Control? It looked like a Pitbull."

"Oh no, that's a stray we found a couple of days ago. Winnie's been begging me to keep it," Madilyn says, watching Winnie offer the dog some cereal off of her own spoon. She leans over to snatch it before she can put it back in her mouth; Wick gets up and grabs her a new one.

"Are you sure? Those things can be dangerous." Adam has always had a soft spot for Winnie, which is what she'd banked on when she called him, but the last thing she needs is him poking his nose too far into her business.

"It'll be fine," Madilyn says, rolling her eyes. "He's a little bit stupid, but so far harmless." Wick gives her a look that seems vaguely affronted; she quirks her mouth at him.

"If you're sure," says Adam. "I guess you'll want me to pick up some food for him too?"

"I'll make sure it's on the list," Madilyn says. "Thanks again, you're really helping me out here. I owe you one."

Adam's voice changes, shifts into something warm and a little shy. "Anytime, Annabel, you know that."

She defers vaguely and ends the call before _that_ can go anywhere, discomfort beyond the physical coiling low in her stomach.

"Did I do good, Mommy?" Winnie asks, now picking bits of cereal out of her milk and attempting to manipulate the dog into doing tricks for them. He doesn't respond to her commands other than to wag his tail and whine.

"You did amazing," Madilyn says. "Mr. Adam is gonna bring some stuff over for us later, isn't that nice?"

"Yeah," says Winnie. "Is he going 'cause of your face?" The dog jumps when she tosses a cornflake in the air, catching it in his mouth. She laughs.

Madilyn blinks at her. "Yeah, sweetie, that's right. Mommy can't go outside with her face looking like this, people might get worried. So we have to pretend for Mr. Adam that you're sick so he doesn't think something bad happened."

"Why can't Mr. John go shopping?"

Madilyn swallows down a sigh. "He's still working on feeling better too, Winnie. Plus, it's a secret that he's here."

"How come?"

_Oh nice one, Madilyn._ She flounders for a moment. Across the table, Wick raises an eyebrow that looks almost sardonic, as if to say, _What now, Moone? _

She scowls at him. As though raising the world's most inquisitive five-year-old hasn't prepared her for situations when she can't give an answer, _please_. "Are you finished with your breakfast?"

Question forgotten, Winnie raises her bowl and slurps down the rest of the milk, effectively spilling most of it on her shirt and the table in the process. "I am now!"

"_Winifred_," Madilyn groans, but lacks the energy to admonish her more than that. She braces herself, then shifts slowly to her feet, stunned to discover she doesn't instantly want to collapse in pain. The pills must already be working their magic, but strangely her head still feels clear, not groggy and slow like with most other effective painkillers. She supposes she shouldn't be surprised - Doc always was more liberal with the good stuff for the assassins.

She grabs a rag off the kitchen counter and leans down to clean off her disaster child and the surrounding table, ignoring the irritable way Winnie tries to jerk away from her. "Mommy, you _stink_," she says.

That's probably true, actually - she hadn't wanted to risk showering last night when the world had been twisting and shifting around her, for fear she might do something stupid like pass out and drown, or worse, pass out and have Wick come to her rescue. Blood and sweat and dirt cling to her skin; something worse clings to the back of her throat. It's been a long time since she's felt this grimy, both inside and out.

"Well that works out," Madilyn says, giving herself a mental shake, "because I'm about to take a shower. _You_ are going to park your fanny on the couch and watch some cartoons while I do that."

"Yes!" Winnie says, leaping off the chair before Madilyn can catch her and flinging herself onto the sofa that Wick hasn't been occupying the last few days.

When Madilyn turns back, Wick is watching her. She feels, oddly, like she ought to apologize for letting Winnie invade his space for a while, and then scowls at the thought - his entire existence in her home is an invasion of space.

She takes Winnie's dishes to the sink and leans heavily against the counter as she compiles a rough grocery list, grabs a wad of emergency cash from the loose panel in the back of one of the cupboards, and takes a few moments to shove some dry toast in her face. It's the most her rolling stomach can handle, and also about the only thing in the house left to eat. A thought occurs to her.

"Have you eaten?" she says, turning back to Wick. She means breakfast, but she also means _at all_. She doesn't think she's seen him eat a single thing since he's been here, which is a problem if she's trying to get him to recover.

He nods to the food in her hand. "Toast."

She sighs, wracking her brain for what he might need. Madilyn knows herself to be an average cook at best, and mostly recycles variations of the same ten meals she'd panic-learned when Winnie was ready to be weaned off baby food. The idea of cooking for Wick isn't a pleasant one at all. Still, needs must; she adds a few more items to her list, more fruits and vegetables, some meat, lots of eggs. She's _great_ at eggs.

"Do you drink coffee?" she asks. Madilyn doesn't, she'd never really enjoyed the taste, but she'd been forced to rely on it heavily when Winnie was a newborn, drinking it blacker than sin and in alarming quantities to keep up with her daughter's nonsensical sleep schedule. The coffeemaker has been stored somewhere in the bowels of one of the bottom cabinets for years now, but it still works, probably.

He nods, and she adds _coffee - any kind_ to the list. She gambles and takes a moment to also add _bandages_ to the bottom, hoping she can BS her way out of any questions that Adam might ask about it. His wounds seem to be healing well enough, for the most part sealing without infection, but they still need to be covered, especially that ugly one on his thigh that she suspects came very close to killing him. She tacks _dog food_ on at the end and shoves off from the counter, surprising herself by not swaying at all as she makes her way to the front door.

She peers out the peephole to make sure no one is anywhere around, and then steps out, tucking the cash and list under the mat. A quick text to Adam lets him know it's ready whenever he is, and she ducks back inside, throwing the locks back into place.

Winnie peers at her, flat on her stomach on the sofa with her chin propped on the armrest, deliberately pitiful. Madilyn makes a face at her - _ouch_ \- and switches the TV on to one of the random kid's channels before bussing a kiss to the crown of her head.

"Mr. Adam might knock when he comes over. Remember the rule about not answering the door, and keep away from the windows," she says, tapping on Winnie's nose to get her attention. Her daughter nods dutifully.

"Okay, Mommy."

Madilyn casts a glance at Wick, watching him watch her. She wonders if his perpetual study of her is about natural, ingrained wariness, or sheer boredom. Maybe it's both.

"There might be some books on the shelf that aren't related to parenting," she says, unsure why she's bothering. His inactivity is no concern of hers. "If you want something to do," she finishes, aiming for casual. She gets the strange sense they'd struck a quiet truce last night, but she's even less familiar with truces than she is with cooking. She still mostly hates him, but maybe a ceasefire means she's not allowed to show it?

"Thanks," Wick says after what feels like a long time, revealing nothing about whether or not he's actually grateful for the information. It occurs to her that he might not know how to respond to their truce either.

She doesn't care to unpack that, concussed and generally emotionally stunted as she is. Instead, she sighs, and turns down the hall. That shower is calling her name.

* * *

It takes John an inordinate amount of time to find the books Moone had mentioned. Tucked in the corner of the very top shelf of the bookcase on the far wall is a collection of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, and beside that is a copy of Maya Angelou's autobiography. These are, apparently, his only two options outside of titles like _Oh Crap! Potty Training_ and _The Power of Play_. He selects Poe after a moment's deliberation and makes his way back to the couch. The book is careworn, but dusty, probably purchased secondhand. The yellowed pages and loose spine make him long, sharply and inexplicably, for his bookbinding tools.

He's midway through "The Tell-Tale Heart" when the knock on the door comes. No doubt it's Moone's friend - Adam, as she'd called him in that friendly, false tone - trying for a word with her before going on his errand. John reaches for his gun anyway, tucked neatly between the couch cushions. The curtains to the front windows are drawn and have been since his arrival, but he feels the urge to draw back from them anyway, to hide himself in the shadows where he belongs.

Winifred looks over at the door, but doesn't move towards it, only regards it with idle curiosity for a moment before turning back to the TV screen where a cartoon platypus in a fedora battles a man in a white lab coat.

"Do you like this show?" she asks.

He doesn't draw his eyes from the door. "I've never seen it."

In his periphery, he watches her mouth drop open. "It's my _favorite_. Besides the Rapunzel show."

He nods like he understands, and she turns back to the TV, riveted. After a few moments, there's a slight scuffling on the front step; Adam is leaving, presumably with the grocery list. He waits another beat, then gets up, making his way to the window and peering through the barest crack in the curtains. He catches only the man's back as he makes his way down the sidewalk and into a neighboring house, but John can tell he's tall and slight and fair-haired, no visible tattoos and nothing to mark him as someone who works under the Table. It had been unlikely, but people from their world lurk under just about every rock and around every corner. It never hurts to be cautious.

A rustle of movement at his side makes him look down; Winifred peers out the window beside him for a brief moment and then looks up with a mischievous smile.

"Thought your mom told you to stay away from the windows," he says.

"_You're_ here," she replies, which he supposes is a fair point.

She turns back and points in the direction the man had gone. "He's our neighbor," she explains. Her grin stretches, her tongue poking through a gap in her front teeth, and she leans towards him, crooking her finger at him with a great show of conspiracy. He obliges her by bending down, just slightly.

"He has a _crush _on my Mommy," she says in a stage whisper so loud it could barely be considered whispering at all.

"Does he?" _Poor guy,_ John thinks despite himself. It would explain that curious look of discomfort that had flashed over her face as she'd ended the phone call with him, the way she'd almost thrown the phone away from her when it was over. He's known her for less than a week and he can already tell that kind of attention would chafe at her. He can practically see her hunched posture in his mind's eye, head ducked, brow furrowed, fists clenched with arms drawn tight to her body. The body language of someone who loathes being seen, who hates being noticed; she takes the position whenever she senses his eyes on her, whenever she remembers he's in her space, occupying her home. He wonders if she even knows she does it.

Winifred nods enthusiastically, pulling him from his thoughts. "They went on a _date_ once," she says, which effectively floors him. "He even kissed her. On her _cheek_." Her eyes are as wide as saucers, voice comically grave. "Mommy says they're only friends. But I think Mr. Adam wants to kiss her again, cuz she's pretty and she smells nice after she showers."

John pulls the curtain fully closed and makes his way back to the couch, nudging the dog out of his sprawl across the cushions to make room. Winifred goes back to her own seat, but doesn't look back at her show; her baby-blues are fixed on him.

She tilts her head again. "Do you think my mommy is pretty?"

It takes everything he has not to sigh. "Sure," he says, but it's a lie. He's never actually thought about it one way or another. He doesn't tend to think in those terms, in categories of aesthetic. He thinks _can I kill it_, thinks, _is it a threat_,_ is it a weapon_. Sofia is pretty, and Perkins had been too, but those realizations had been afterthoughts, second or third or tenth after _dangerous_, _clever_, _has good aim_, _wants to kill me_.

Moone isn't ugly, as far as he can tell, it's just… _Helen _had been pretty. She'd been beautiful. It had almost bowled him over the first time he'd seen her, walking into work at the clinic on the corner. And it's not that Helen wasn't hundreds of other things, like incredibly smart and capable and kind and loyal - it's that she was so far removed from his world, from the circles of Hell that he'd operated in then, and operates in now, that the first thing he'd been _able _to notice was the sheer prettiness of her, like a punch to the gut. He'd never believed in love at first sight because he'd never, before meeting Helen, believed in _love_, but that moment had almost made him want to.

Moone isn't like Helen. No one is, no one could be, but Moone, especially, is abjectly, obviously, not anything at all like the woman he'd married. There's an angry, paranoid flourish to everything she does that isn't directly related to the kid, and even that is shadowed with the truth that she'd _kidnapped _that kid. Something is broken in Moone, deep down in her core in that place that so many under the Table are broken, in that place that he himself is broken; in Moone the break created something sharp and burning and just a little bit mad. She's nothing more or less than a person who has been raised, molded, and in all other ways influenced by a life lived entirely under the High Table, and it's enough to make her abhorrent to him, the same way that he is abhorrent to many others. They are both of them something between dead and alive, more beast than human.

So no, he doesn't think Moone is pretty. Strategic and wary, bitter and intelligent, ferocious and unapologetic, but not pretty.

He only realizes it had been a mistake to lie after Winifred grins at him in sheer, brilliant delight. "Do you want to kiss her?"

That question, at least, has an answer he doesn't have to think about. "No."

Her smile evaporates into a confused scowl she'd no doubt learned from Moone. "Why _not?_"

"Because I'm married," he says.

Her eyes go wide. "Married?"

He thinks he hears Helen's laugh in his ear, distantly. "Yeah."

"Where's your wife? Is she back in the Big Apple? Mommy said that's where you're from."

"My wife died," he says. Curious, how that hasn't gotten less painful to say, think about, experience. The ache is as fresh as the day he'd lost her. Sometimes, when it's especially quiet, he thinks he can still hear the awful, endless drone of her flatline buzzing in his ears.

"Oh," Winifred says, quieter. "That's sad."

"Yeah." John wonders how much she actually understands about death, about people leaving and not coming back. She watches him for a long time, frowning like something about him confuses her, before eventually turning back to her show. Her brow remains furrowed, but she doesn't ask him any more questions.

It's a relief to have her gaze away from him. He regards her for a single moment longer before turning, gradually, back to his book.

"_And now — have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?_"

The story isn't long, and he recalls, vaguely, how it ends, but he finds himself unable to focus on it again, and after a few more moments, closes the book and hauls himself back off the couch. He moves to put it back in its former place and, as he does so, catches a glimpse down the hall toward the bathroom door, right as it opens to allow Moone to step out in nothing but a towel. She freezes, and so, to his own surprise, does he.

Her dripping hair is much darker like this, plastered wet to her head and shoulders, and with this much skin exposed he can see that her bruising is a lot deeper and more extensive than he'd realized. The tattoos continue too, tracing down her chest to disappear beneath the towel and spiraling out down her legs, too far away to make out any kind of detail from where he's standing. She doesn't have the typical body of the proficient gymnast he knows her to be; she's too slight, too wiry, but her biceps and calves are well-defined, and he remembers from the day she'd been shirtless in front of him that her abdomen had been unmistakably lined with muscle. It's the figure of an athlete of necessity, not leisure. His eyes snap back to her face in time to watch her expression tighten, her brow furrow and her jaw jerk. The scars across her mouth flatten, blown pink and bright from the heat of her shower.

_Well? _says the lift of her chin, a challenge even as her entire body draws in like a snake coiling.

He turns, carefully, away. An instant later he hears the click of her bedroom door snapping shut.

Momentarily at a loss for what to do next, he simply stands there, fighting down an urge to sigh. His muscles ache. The entirety of him aches, but deeply, not just from injuries but inactivity. He's been trying to keep up with his workout regimen, slowly trying to build his body back up as it heals, with only limited success. Gritting his teeth, he sinks to the ground to experiment with sit-ups. The pain is almost nightmarish, the way it has been for some time now, but that's nothing new; his stamina is shot but sheer willpower is an acceptable substitute. He's able to make it to almost thirty reps before his body gives out on him, driving his head back against the carpet with a soft _thunk. _

Winifred is watching him again, peering over the armrest of the couch, but he ignores her. He takes several deep breaths - and several more, until he can move again - before turning over, bracing his hands for push-ups.

"Can I help, Mr. John?"

He presses down against the carpet, forcing his body up despite the way that his world has narrowed down to pinpoints of pain. But pain is nothing, it's in the mind, it's mist in the sun. "Help how?" he grunts on an exhale as he lowers himself again, swooping back up faster this time. The room rocks but he keeps going.

"Mommy says it helps when I sit on her back while she does her push-ups," Winifred says. "It makes her muscles stronger."

For whatever reason, maybe due to the sudden lightheadedness he's experiencing, or to the fact that he hasn't slept for more than a few hours at a time in several days, the mental image almost makes him smile. "No thanks," he says. "Maybe some other time."

"Okay."

He keeps going, pushing himself once again to his limit. The pain spikes and ebbs, contracts his muscles and loosens them in measures. He doesn't stop moving. One way or another, he'll drive this weakness out of himself. He's already been down and vulnerable for too long.

When Moone reemerges several minutes later, towelling her hair dry and studiously avoiding looking at him, he's moved back to sit-ups. She edges around him with a faint sneer, their earlier truce forgotten. Her posture is hunched again, slouched into the instinctive _come near me and I'll bite_ position she wears like armor.

"Mr. Adam came and got the money!" Winifred crows, snapping the tension between them. "He knocked but we didn't answer."

"Good job, kiddo," Moone says, holding out her fist, and Winifred leaps off the couch to pound it with her own, making a soft explosion noise.

John watches her walk back into the kitchen, still without looking at him. She's barefoot, wearing a pair of dark jeans and a tank top, and even though he knows she uses cheap, scentless body wash, she still smells clean, light like fresh laundry. The image of her, damp and scowling in the dim light of the hall, rises in his mind without his permission. He snaps his eyes closed against it, grits his teeth.

_No,_ he thinks, lowering himself back to the floor again, _not pretty at all_.

* * *

The day had come and gone without further incident after Adam dropped the groceries off, and Madilyn breathes a little easier for it as she wrestles Winnie into her pajamas later that night.

"Mommy," Winnie says as Madilyn finally manages to pull the nightgown over her head, static electricity making her bright red hair stick up in all directions like the world's cutest dandelion, "I figured out why Mr. John always looks so sad all the time."

"You think he looks sad?" Madilyn says, somewhat surprised. She doesn't think he looks like much of anything, except maybe a killer.

Winnie jumps to sit on her bottom, bouncing once on the bed with her patented _duh _expression. "It's his eyebrows. They're sad eyebrows."

"I'll take your word for it," Madilyn says, reaching for the poetry book on her nightstand, the same way she does every night. They're still in Byron, which Winnie seems to be enjoying. She'd really seemed to like "She Walks In Beauty" in particular, giggling over how romantic it was when Madilyn had given her usual painstaking explanation of what each line means.

"What did he say?" Madilyn continues, flipping to the page they'd left off at last time. She still can't see out of her swollen eye at all, so it's just as well she knows every word in this book by heart.

"He said his wife died," Winnie says with uncharacteristic softness, tracing idle patterns on the blanket at her side. "I think he's lonely."

Madilyn busies herself with adjusting the bookmark. "You do?"

"Well yeah," Winnie says, crinkling her nose. "Whenever the wife dies in the poem they always say they're _forlorn_, which you said means lonely."

Madilyn huffs out a soft laugh, reaching up to rub at the scars on her mouth before catching herself just in time. She smooths some of Winnie's hair down instead. "Did he say what happened to her?" The question has been burning in her mind since she'd first worked out that the woman must be dead, in order for Wick to be back and missing his ring finger, but she'd never dared to ask, perhaps for the same reason Wick has never asked why she stole Winnie. It's a delicate, unspoken balance she's incredibly grateful for and has no intention of disturbing herself, but if _Winnie _had been able to get details...

"No," Winnie says, shrugging. "I didn't want to be _rude_."

It's a funny thing, those rare moments when Winnie decides to remember the many, many, _many _lessons Madilyn has desperately tried to impart on her about appropriate questions and timing and the like, but she thanks her lucky stars her daughter had remembered today. Wick seems tame enough when there's no immediate threat to his person, but everyone, everyone on the _planet_, has a violence line, and she doesn't want Winnie dancing anywhere near the Baba Yaga's. No matter how curious Madilyn happens to be about what exactly had dragged Wick back into the life he'd been lucky enough to escape from.

"That's good," Madilyn says.

"Yeah," Winnie says. "I think we can fix him, though."

The relief drains out abruptly, to be filled with a slow, creeping dread that niggles at the back of her mind. "Fix him how, Lamb?"

"We can make him not lonely anymore," Winnie says. "He should stay with us."

"I don't," Madilyn sighs, fights the urge to rub at her temples because her face is still a wreck, "I don't think it's the same, baby. It doesn't work like that."

"He thinks you're pretty, though." Winnie argues. "So maybe he _likes_ you."

Madilyn freezes, goes cold to her core. "He told you that?"

"Yeah."

She's immediately taken back to that hallway when she'd locked eyes with him as she'd stood there in nothing but a towel. In this as in everything he'd had no expression, even his eyes had given nothing away, but he'd still stared at her, watched her like he was trying to see _through _her, right to the ugly center of everything she is. Her fingers start to quiver just at the memory.

"He doesn't think that," Madilyn says, knowing it beyond a shadow of a doubt. "He was just being polite." She can't read him, has very little data to sift through about his feelings for her, but she knows _attraction_ is nowhere on the list. _You stole the girl_, he'd accused, and something had sparked behind his eyes, something damning and touched with contempt.

_He can go to hell,_ Madilyn thinks with familiar resolve. Like she gives a damn whether he thinks she's pretty or not. She'll stab his eyes out, see how much staring he can do with them then.

"But he said -" Winnie tries, drawing her from her steadily-mounting ire, and Madilyn spears her with a look.

"Mr. John is sad, you're right," she says, softly but firmly. "And we need to give him space. If he wants to be friends with you," Madilyn pauses, has to physically take a moment to keep from scowling at the idea, "then he needs to make that decision on his own. You can't make him not sad just because you want it to happen, okay?"

Winnie frowns. "That's dumb."

"Winifred, say okay."

"Okay, Mommy."

Her daughter is quiet after that, tucking her stuffed lamb beneath her chin and curling close to Madilyn's side as she listens to Byron's words weave their hypnotic rhythm through the room. Madilyn is grateful for the opportunity to let her brain spin at what feels like a thousand miles an hour with all the information Winnie has just given her.

As much as she dislikes Winnie's fascination with everything that has to do with Wick, though, and as much as she dislikes him in general, she can't help but think about _forlorn_, about how he seems less like a guest in her home and more like a ghost haunting her halls. The familiar words of a much different poem begin to slither through her mind, heavy and hot like molten lead in her chest. She'd wept over these particular words once as a teenager as a deep and black _forlornness _shook her down to her soul, and later, again, the night she got Winnie. She's pressing the heel of her hand over the scars on her mouth before she can stop herself, and for some reason can't seem to draw her hand away.

She brings the Byron poem to a close - "Darkness", one of Madilyn's least favorites - and, almost as though she's watching the movement play out outside of her own body, shuts the book and sets it aside, leaning back against the headboard and drawing Winnie tight, tight, tight to her.

"It was many and many a year ago," Madilyn begins, hearing the words as though from far away, "in a kingdom by the sea, that a maiden there lived whom you may know, by the name of Annabel Lee."

Most nights, now that Wick has entered their lives, Madilyn tends to keep her voice lowered to almost a whisper when she reads poetry to Winnie, and she's not really sure what drives the impulse other than that it is a deeply, deeply sacred practice to her and she doesn't want Wick anywhere near it. Tonight, however, she catches herself reciting this particular poem at a normal volume, letting her eyes trail towards the door Winnie had insisted on leaving cracked in case the dog wanted to come in and cuddle with her. She's hardly shouting, but it's a very small house, and she knows her voice must be carrying down the dark hall to the living room.

"The angels, not half so happy in heaven, went envying her and me -" Madilyn continues, absently stroking a hand through Winnie's curls.

There was a boy, once. She doesn't even like to think his name, because she doesn't deserve to, didn't deserve to even know him, and her knowing him is what had gotten him killed. But there was a boy with eyes as green as spring, and then there wasn't one, and all that's left of him are the scars on her mouth and the gaps in her memory from a night so horrific her brain won't let her recall it completely. All she remembers is _before _and _after_, and of that mostly _after_, huddled and bloody beneath her bed in a room she shared with fifteen other kids. She remembers being mindless with pain and with a heavy, howling grief she kept locked tightly in her throat for fear that that, too, would be stolen from her. She remembers mindlessly reaching for her book of poetry, the only thing that had ever kept her sane, and, dead-eyed, skimming the pages with what little of her consciousness was left. Remembers: "But our love it was stronger by far than the love, of those who were older than we—" Madilyn swallows, drives her palm into her mouth, forces herself to release, "of many far wiser than we—"

It had been a cold, quiet comfort to her then, to be so deeply understood by a poet who had died long before her time. And, years later, it had been a comfort still, if only a desperate, defeated one, as she screeched out of New York City with a stolen infant wailing in her backseat. She hadn't thought a person could survive that kind of loss twice, and yet somehow she'd managed, the words of this poem spilling like a prayer from her mouth to drown out the cries and the gunshot still ringing in her ears. There may be more than one kind of love, but it all burns the same way when it's gone.

She shakes herself from the memory, never losing the rhythm of her story. The point is, Madilyn doesn't care about Wick's comfort, not even a little bit, it's just… he really does look _forlorn_. It's pathetic. She swallows again and continues to recite the words that rattle the breath in her lungs without thinking about why.

"For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams, of the beautiful Annabel Lee -" Madilyn nearly falters when she hears the hall floor creak, but keeps going as though nothing is out of the ordinary, as though his presence is inconsequential.

"And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes, of the beautiful Annabel Lee -"

That's definitely Wick's shadow, passing on the floor; by the time his face appears in the doorway she's ready for him, meeting his gaze evenly. _See me, will you?_ she thinks, lifting her chin at him. _Well I can see you, too._

"And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side, of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride," Madilyn says, watching as something fleeting, something she couldn't hope to read in the distance and the dark, flickers over his expression.

And then he's gone, disappearing down the hall and into the bathroom as though he'd never been there. _Got you,_ she thinks, tilting her head back against the wall and letting her eyes slip closed.

"In her sepulchre there by the sea," Madilyn murmurs. She resolutely does not think of forgotten boys or jobs that went wrong.

"In her tomb by the sounding sea."

* * *

**A/N: Alright, who's not dead? Sound off.**

**Mad props to anyone who's still reading this! I'm so sorry this took so long, I never meant to let it go a year (to the day! I was determined not to go over!) without updating, but life is wild sometimes, you know? Even before the pandemic, stuff started getting wonky in my personal life, y'all know how it be. All credit goes entirely to proudspires on tumblr for her endless words of encouragement and support regarding this fic. She's got a couple of cool projects in the works over on AO3, any fans of Birds of Prey or Far Cry 5 should go check her out!**

**Anyway, major thanks to everyone who reviewed, favorited, and followed in the last year! I really appreciate every bit of it and we'll start getting back into the action in the coming chapters. If you liked this, or if you want to see more, please toss a review to your writer! She needs all the encouragement she can get.**

**Sincerely,**

**Starcrier.**


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